Carrie Cracknell’s production, which had its premiere on New Year’s Eve, sets the opera in the present-day U.S. while offering few fresh insights into Bizet’s classic
By
Rafael Davila and Aigul Akhmetshina
PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA
New York
Director Carrie Cracknell, who made her Metropolitan Opera debut with a new production of Bizet’s “Carmen” on New Year’s Eve, is known for modernizing and giving a feminist edge to classic texts. Her 2022 film of Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” for example, artfully interpolated contemporary dialogue into the 19th-century setting and made its protagonist the narrator, even the architect, of her own story. However, “Carmen,” one of the opera canon’s hoariest chestnuts, proved impervious to Ms. Cracknell’s efforts. Updated to present-day America and stripped of its touristic Spanish flourishes (no flamenco or gypsies, a rodeo stadium instead of a bullfighting arena), this “Carmen” offered no new insights into the freedom-craving title character and her hapless, murderous lover, Don José.
Michael Levine’s heavy, ugly sets overpowered the story. Act I offered a looming, full stage-height wall (the factory) with a chain-link fence in front, positioned so far downstage that the chorus scenes were cramped and chaotic. Lillas Pastia’s tavern in Act 2 became a giant tractor-trailer, its spinning wheels and the arrangement of flashing neon lights surrounding it simulating, not very persuasively, a speedy drive down a highway. Escamillo overtook it in a red sports car, accompanied by three pickup trucks full of men waving automatic weapons; the car and pickups then backed out the way they had come to leave room for Carmen and José’s meeting on and around a pair of gas pumps.
A scene from ’Carmen’
PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA
For the smuggler’s hideout in Act 3, the now-crashed tractor-trailer lay on its side and rotated far too many times, with Guy Hoare’s lighting picking out whoever had an aria to sing and leaving the rest in gloom. (The smugglers appeared to be running guns taken from the factory, perhaps into Mexico? Unclear.) The bleachers for the rodeo in Act 4 made more sense, although this set also rotated more often than necessary. Shadowy projections by rocafilm/Roland Horvath on a scrim before each act were too vague to offer much insight. Tom Scutt’s costumes fit the scruffy context, especially Carmen’s tiny denim cut-off shorts and turquoise cowboy boots. Choreographer Ann Yee supplied some low-key dance moves for the women partying in the truck.
Ms. Akhmetshina
PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA
Ms. Cracknell’s directing did little to explore the toxic relationship between the two protagonists. One got no sense of their mutual attraction, nor of Don José’s suppressed violence. Perhaps the point was that even the wimpiest-seeming men think that they are entitled to bend women to their will by whatever means necessary, but that’s too subtle a message for this opera. There was no theatrical sense of risk-taking or impending doom; everyone seemed to be going through the motions rather than living the drama. The one directorial choice that did read clearly was the actual murder: Carmen picks up a baseball bat to defend herself and Don José wrenches it out of her hands and slugs her with it—the physically stronger male easily appropriating any and all weapons. However, even here, Bizet already stacked the deck: Don José’s pleading music makes him the more sympathetic character of the two in the scene, giving him an out, so the idea of the inherently abusive man didn’t track with the actual opera.
In the title role, the young Russian mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina had the vocal goods—a throaty, low sound with a hint of steel—and she didn’t overplay Carmen’s seductiveness, but her performance was low energy, lacking the character’s magnetism and seeming more acted upon than acting. Tenor Rafael Davila stepped in for the scheduled Don José, Piotr Beczała, who was ill, and gave a serviceable performance, despite some pitch excursions at moments of high emotion.
The cast standouts were Kyle Ketelsen’s Escamillo, whose crisp diction and snappy delivery galvanized attention, and Angel Blue’s poignant yet strong-minded Micaëla—her Act 3 aria was the evening’s high point. Effective in the supporting roles were Sydney Mancasola and Briana Hunter, peppy and ready to rumble as Frasquita and Mercédès; Michael Adams and Frederick Ballentine, with lively ensemble timing as the smugglers Le Dancaïre and Le Remendado; and Benjamin Taylor and Wei Wu as the soldiers Moralès and Zuniga. The Met Chorus meandered rhythmically and physically through the production, and conductor Daniele Rustioni and the Met Orchestra, though noisy, never generated the drive and excitement that keeps “Carmen” at the top of the operatic hit parade.
Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).
AndyManshel.nyc 