Doing Our Best to Make Things Jolly

While visiting my parents in California, I saw the Festival Opera production of Carmen in Walnut Creek on July 7. It was, on the whole, well-sung, with attractive sets and costumes. The ensemble musical work, in particular, was excellent. But a number of odd dramatic choices, and some unfortunate staging, took a bit away from my experience.

I’ll start with the big one. The relationship between Carmen and Don Jose was weird. Ryan MacPherson, their Don Jose, was young and on the dashing side; at points, I was convinced that they were playing at an epic romance. Two bars into “La fleur que tu m’avais jetée”, Carmen’s icy demeanor seemed to have melted into an “aww, he really likes me!” face, and at the end of Jose’s declaration of total batshit obsession, he went in for a tender kiss, and appeared to be warmly received, although to be honest, it was hard to tell because her back was for some reason facing the audience at that point. So they kissed for a while before Carmen changed her mind and said how if you REALLY loved me, you’d run off with me, so go away please, I hate you.

The last (and first!) time I saw Carmen, with Opera Delaware, I thought the characterizations in this scene worked quite a lot better. Carmen had this sort of “ok, do I REALLY have to sit here and listen politely to this? Ok, FINE” expression, which is way more plausible. The way I see it, the interesting thing about Carmen and Jose’s relationship is that by the time he wants to go join in the bugle retreat, everybody in the whole world except for Jose knows that this relationship is just a terrible idea. That was lost in this production, which seemed ambivalent about whether it thought those crazy kids could really make it. The weird extended romance continued; they share a passionate kiss at the end of Act III, after his decidedly unenthusiastic joining of the gang.

Kendall Gladen’s Carmen’s, on the whole, lacked a lot of the fire that it can have. Too often, she shrank away, averted her eyes, and adopted a submissive attitude. The first three times that Jose started getting violent and yelling at her, she curled away from him like, if you’ll forgive the expression, a woman; only the last time, when the libretto calls for her to express fearlessness, do we see anything approaching defiance in her face. She had a very fine voice, though. And I should be clear — with the (admittedly major) exception of her responses to Don Jose, her acting was good too. The Habanera, and pretty much all of Act I, was excellent, I thought. She carried herself well and oozed sexual power.

One of my favorite scenes is when Carmen dances for Don Jose in Act II. The combination of voice, dance, castanets, and trumpet is just fascinating in how well it all fits together. But tonight, Carmen didn’t have castanets. Neither were castinets supplied by the orchestra. Instead, Don Jose picked up a guitar that was sitting nearby, turned it face-side-in on his lap, and absentmindedly THUMPED his hands against it, thumping out the rhythm of the castanet clicks. I wish I could convey through text the extent to which guitar-thumps, in the relevant context, are poor substitutes for castanet clicks.

The choreography throughout seemed rather static. There were lots of arm and foot movements in the big gypsy scenes — but pretty much everybody stayed in his or her own spot on stage. Maybe there was limited rehearsal time for choreography, but some of those scenes, particularly in Act II, did get visually dull.

There was a very odd decision made regarding the ending. Don Jose produces a very large, very shiny knife, and raises it, apparently intending to kill Carmen. (”Ooh,” I think, if that’s a retracting knife, it’s the best one I’ve ever seen. Or will they use some stage trick to stab her behind her body or something?”) He comes up to her from behind, and raises the knife, and prepares to strike. She gives the knife a “oh, you’re a lame knife, I distain you!” look, and then looks him in the eyes, like, “so you gonna do it, or what?”, and it’s actually pretty cool. Great acting from Gladen at this moment. And THEN, Don Jose turns and looks at the knife, too, and he’s like, “who am I kidding, I’m not gonna stab her.” And then he DROPS the knife! Whoa! This is sort of interesting, and maybe psychologically plausible, but I know how this opera ends. Is he going to pick the knife back up? So I’m thinking, what NOW??? And Carmen turns to walk away. Don Jose leaves the knife lying on the ground and casually pulls a large pistol out of his trousers and shoots her in the back. I didn’t really see the point of making this the Carmen where he shoots her; it seemed a little non sequitor. Maybe I just didn’t get it.

Oh yeah, and then the crowd couldn’t be bothered to enter again, so Jose sings to the empty stage about how he’s the one who killed her, so go ahead and arrest him. Weird.

I’ve been harsh so far, because many of the things I care most about disappointed. But others were good. And I know, it’s opera, but this is a very drama-driven opera, and the directorial departures from the libretto were deliberately made. So I think this is fair game for criticism.

One more odd choice along these lines, back in Act I. Carmen has given Don Jose the rose, and he’s intoxicated by her, and then Michaela and mum bring him back to his senses. He sings about how that was a narrow escape, and then picks up the rose and raises his arm as if angrily to fling it away, when he is interrupted by the cigarette-girl fight. Now, Jose has decided he’s through with Carmen, and he’s literally begun the physical act of throwing her rose away — but now, interrupted, he doesn’t finish the arm movement to throw it away. Nor does he just drop it disinterestedly. Instead, he catches himself, carefully puts the rose into his pocket, and goes curiously to investigage the disturbance. This sequence just didn’t seem thought through. I couldn’t make sense of Jose’s psychology at that point.

The quality of the singing was, on the whole, strong. Carmen’s rich, warm, sexy voice was just right (although once or twice it got buried in ensembles), and Don Jose had a bright high tenor with easy access to the upper range. Escamillo — Eugene Brancoveanu — had the kind of large, warm and round baritone voice that I always envy. His acting was charming and good, too — he had a bit of a baby face, but his presence and voice won out. Rebecca Garcia’s Micaëla had a pleasant presence and a nice voice, although I think the role might’ve been a bit much for her at points. The smaller roles were all excellent; Zuniga and Frasquita, I thought, were the two standouts from that crowd. I believe that some of their material was cut.

The quintet was really excellent, and quite fast. It didn’t sound half as hard as I know it is. Bryan Nies, the conductor, seemed to have done an excellent job.

One staging bit that worked well was in the card scene; Carmen laid out her cards alone, separated from everyone else, who did not notice her. This made for a nice juxtaposition, and avoided the awkward question why Carmen’s friends don’t seem to share in her concern.

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