Roger Honeywell as Don Jose and Beth Clayton as Carmen

Seth Mease Carico as Zuniga and Morgan Smith as Escamillo

Beth Clayton (center) as Carmen

Left to right: Rick Rainey, Beth Clayton and Evan McCormack.

Sandra Lopez as Micaela

Beth Clayton as Carmen

  

Carmen

by Georges Bizet

Presented by Fort Worth Opera

April 25 - May 10

at

$19-$154

Repeats 2 p.m. May 3 & 8 p.m. May 8

Advance publicity for the Fort Worth Opera’s production of Bizet’s Carmen promised a “traditional” production. However, the implication of “traditional," for some of us at least, means stodginess and deliberate adherence to old ideas. That doesn’t begin to describe the level of directorial insight and imagination displayed in this production.

Indeed, about the only way in which this Carmen was traditional was in its use of authentic 19th-century costumes and massive, realistic sets, originally designed by Allen Charles Klein for Austin Lyric Opera. Director John de los Santos (who also choreographed several dance sequences) discovered multitudes of innuendos, subtexts, cross-relationships and possibilities—most obviously in the words, but frequently in the music as well.

For instance, in the opening scene, the soldiers and the street urchins are almost at war with each other, with the children teasing and pushing the soldiers to their limits in a definitely uneasy relationship. The children, presented in most productions as a harmless, playful bunch, become a gang of pre-adolescent ruffians, while the soldiers become potential rapists when Micaela arrives on the scene.

Santos’ staging continually presents possibilities that never emerge in most productions of Carmen. Here, as performed by Beth Clayton, Carmen wavers on the edge of insanity. Her cruelty and lust are delivered without a touch of sweetness in the opening sections—this  is Carmen not as seductress, but as dominatrix—with the result that her despair and resignation in the final scenes are more powerful than ever.

As portrayed by Morgan Smith, Escamillo the Toreador emerges—once again thanks to Santos’ careful placement—not  so much as a lover of Carmen but as a double or even a competitor. One might almost say that the pivotal point of the opera in this production is the moment at which Escamillo, in the midst of his famous aria (here rendered even more monumentally egocentric) catches Carmen, alone on the edge of the stage, out of the corner of his eye for the first time.

Picking up on numerous clues in the music as well as the words, Santos has created a staging that could easily be viewed as a parable of the conflict of the irrepressible compulsiveness of Carmen and Escamillo against Don Jose’s sense of duty—or even of restrained, civilized life (as represented by Don Jose) against the natural, pre-civilized life (as represented by Carmen and Escamillo), resulting in disaster when the two types meet and mingle.

This is, by the way, an unusually violent version of Carmen, even at the symbolic level, as represented by the final scene, where the rose Carmen once gave to Don Jose has multiplied, as if in a nightmare, and surrounds her in a sea of blood-like redness. And Carmen’s final encounter with Don Jose is staged as a bullfight, with Carmen charging Don Jose repeatedly, like a doomed bull charging a toreador.

Santos has even managed to bring out the political implications of Carmen—of which there are plenty. After the taunting of the soldiers by the children in the first act, the second act begins to look more like a revolution than a tavern brawl.

Clayton’s richly colorful voice matched the energetic eroticism of her portrayal of the title character;  Smith’s rendition of Escamillo complemented convincingly. However, as Don Jose moved up to fortissimo—or even louder—all too often;  Micaela as portrayed by Sandra Lopez had vocal power but didn’t quite find a convincing presence in the midst of the obsessiveness surrounding her. In the pit, Joe Illick conducted the Fort Worth Symphony, which successfully brought out many of the sometimes overlooked subtleties of color in this score.

Productions of this opera in which the possibilities of staging are so successfully realized are rare. In decades of opera going, I’ve never seen a performance of Carmen that realized the dramatic possibilities of the piece so well.

►Wayne Lee Gay was active as a classical music and dance critic in the Dallas-Fort Worth region for many years, and is a past finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He is currently completing a Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of North Texas, where he is a teaching fellow in the English department. He is managing editor of the American Literary Review, and recently completed the short story cycle Jeans, Boots and Starry Skies.

The Fort Worth Opera Festival continues through May 10, with alternating performances of Rossini's Cinderella and Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking.