I suppose this is sensible. Regardless of “Carmen” being completely able to caring for herself, she evokes a conspicuous (and oddly contradictory) impulse amongst sure opera sorts to guard her from hurt by faithfully sustaining her regular street to wreck.
Making her firm debut, British director Carrie Cracknell seeks to renavigate Carmen’s journey with this up to date imaginative and prescient. She leaves the opera itself largely intact however airlifts the motion from 17th-century Seville to a noncommittal composite of the 21st-century American Southwest — an assertion I’m making regardless of the director’s reference to the Rust Belt in this system notes.
Thus, the tobacco manufacturing unit of the unique setting is right here envisioned because the rear loading docks of a contemporary cigarette plant, surrounded by chain hyperlink fences and monitored by armed safety guards (who may simply as simply be taken for Border Patrol). Lillas Pastia’s Inn in Act II is shoved into the again of a rushing semitrailer truck flanked by a small fleet of pickups. The flaming wreckage of the truck serves as Act III’s “wild spot within the mountains” — the carousel stage slowly casting its faltering headlights throughout the home like a searchlight. And the bullfight backdrop of the finale is right here reimagined as a rodeo, full with clowns sporting garish costumes sewn from Texas-esque flags. (The pompous Escamillo, reprised right here by the mighty bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, retains his “Toreador” title within the aria, however is recast as a modern-day rodeo star — a pompous cowboy influencer in aviators and chaps.)
On paper (i.e., in program notes), this alteration of environment opened alternatives for Cracknell to discover themes that embrace “male unemployment and dispossession” and “gendered harassment and violence towards ladies.” In apply, it merely supplied an alternate universe for the comet that’s “Carmen” to streak by way of.
And mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina made a magnetic and infrequently caustic Carmen, her voice equally suited to silken lightness as leathery depth. The present barely appeared to maneuver earlier than she emerged from behind a blood-red door on a catwalk above the motion. Her Act I introduction, that acquainted habanera (“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle”), was freshened by her humanistic studying, lightened by luminous choral work, and refined by way of the detail-oriented ear of conductor Daniele Rustioni.
Akhmetshina additionally gave Carmen a stressed physicality that by no means lower into her singing. Her Act II seduction (“Je vais danser en votre honneur … La la la”) discovered her stretched throughout a set of gasoline pumps. Her reverie along with her fellow thieves had her dangling from packing straps and dancing atop crates of smuggled weapons. Relying on the actress, Carmen generally is a middle of gravity or a black gap; Akhmetshina granted sufficient room for her to be each.
The tenor Piotr Beczała, slated to sing the function of Don José, fell sick shortly earlier than the efficiency and was coated by the formidable Rafael Davila. (For individuals who skilled déjà vu, Davila made his personal Met debut as Don José in 2017 as a fill-in for Marcelo Álvarez, who referred to as out with a respiratory an infection 90 minutes earlier than curtain.)
Davila made a fabulous exhibiting on such quick discover, deftly articulating the jilted lover’s arc from dutiful hesitance to blind rage — the unstable “good man” foil to Escamillo’s tox-masc alpha. His pleading Act II aria (“La fleur que tu m’avais jetee”) soared till it was sullied by the unscripted marimbas of somebody’s iPhone. (The New Yr’s Eve viewers was remarkably sloppy on this entrance all evening.) Davila additionally reprised among the problem with props he skilled in 2017, fumbling a handgun and unconvincingly throwing fingers in a number of brawls.
Soprano Angel Blue sang a surprising Micaëla, delivering her memorable Act III aria (“Je dis que rien m’epouvante”) with good heat and a twinge of subdued terror. Soprano Sydney Mancasola and mezzo-soprano Briana Hunter had been additionally terrific of their respective supporting roles of Frasquita and Mercédès — particularly their duet over a deck of doomsaying playing cards.
(After a pause in February and March, the manufacturing resumes in April with conductor Diego Matheuz on the rostrum and a brand new solid that includes mezzo-soprano Clémentine Margaine reprising the title function, tenor Michael Fabiano as Don José, soprano Ailyn Pérez as Micaëla and bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Inexperienced as Escamillo.)
Because the music and the singing went, this was a “Carmen” like every (and plenty of) others — although Rustioni drew specific tartness from the flutes and strings, and whipped up a wild, windblown vitality throughout the orchestra that lent the entire rating a refreshing vivacity.
On each different entrance, this was a “Carmen” marked (and, at instances, marred) by its many tweaks. The resetting of the story in a recent context may as simply be seen as an obscene indulgence of American violence or an equally obscene reflection of an ongoing (and largely unseen) disaster of abusive circumstances for migrant laborers. Cracknell seems to favor the latter.
Equally, prolonged somewhat persistence and consideration, the numerous bells and whistles that brighten up this replace double as surprisingly efficient metaphors for Carmen’s personal tormented psyche. Set designer Michael Levine’s towering chain hyperlink fences and scaffolded rodeo bleachers bookend the opera (and include Carmen herself) like a cage. Lighting designer Man Hoare streaks the stage with bars of white mild, a seize of the reckless rush of Carmen’s trajectory — ditto the windowless journey at the back of the truck because it hurtles into uncertainty.
Then once more, one needn’t be a purist to really feel a contact upset by costumes that aspired, above all, to miserable ranges of verite — the refrain usually materialized as a mob of drab parkas and disposable denim. (Poor Micaëla regarded contemporary from the clearance bin.) Costume designer Tom Scutt’s debut was excessive on verisimilitude however deliberately low on thrills — fringy chaps however.
Maybe the clearest imaginative and prescient of Carmen in Cracknell’s staging can be probably the most summary. A sequence of entre-acte projections (by the staff of by rocafilm/Roland Harvath) solid huge shadowy visions of Carmen’s world: the bars of a fence, the low glow of a dying flame. A silhouette of Carmen emerges from the blur, her hand pressed in opposition to the display as if the opera itself had her trapped. For all of her speak of flight and freedom, Carmen stays a caged hen.
Important to Cracknell was an try and liberate “Carmen” from its personal suffocating male gaze. “They don’t dance for males,” she states plainly in this system of Carmen and her sister smugglers. “They don’t dance as a result of they should. They dance to really feel alive.”
And definitely, this was a “Carmen” that felt alive — a brightness that swiftly darkened within the closing act. (So when you’ve got by no means seen “Carmen,” don’t learn this half.)
The Chekhovian look of a baseball bat on the rodeo portends Cracknell’s greatest transfer: a homicide with literal and figurative blunt power influence, all of the extra merciless for its unremarkable realism. When, because the curtain falls and solely the ladies on the rodeo stand to bear witness to her physique on the bottom, Carmen appears out of the blue much less like a insurgent than a consultant, her freedom a fleeting dream, her final flight the one escape.
“Carmen” runs by way of Feb. 3 (resuming April 12 by way of Could 25) on the Metropolitan Opera: www.metopera.org.