Stephanie G. Mathis The Metropolitan Opera claims that its new production “Carmen” is aimed at “reinvigorating this classic story.”
Carrie Cracknell has adapted Bizet’s tale about a headstrong, heedless woman and her tragic destiny from early 19th-century Spain into present-day America. The action seems to be set somewhere near the Mexican border, where guns and rodeo performers (instead of the libretto’s toreadors) are local celebrities.
Cracknell said that this change was intended to “find the relevance of contemporary concerns” within the piece. But it is not much change. This bland, lethargic staging that opened on New Year’s Eve follows the usual pattern of Met updates: it is almost gesture-for-gesture, the same as any old, stale “Carmen” dressed in trucker hats and cutoff jeans instead of flamenco dresses and castanets.
Be careful. This “Carmen’s” only real star is the 27-year-old mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhimetshina in turquoise cowboy boots. She sings with a piercing clarity and ease despite this being her first major role at the Met. Her agile, molten tone can be confiding at one moment and extroverted at the next. She moves onstage with a magnetic naturalness.
She suffers from an uninspired staging, lacking in passion, wit, and depth. Cracknell describes her approach to directing as “looking through feminist lenses.” Maybe because the harshness and darkness of the title character might be perceived as being antifeminist – as Carmen provoking her former lover to kill her instead of losing her – Akhmetshina’s take on this part is fundamentally sincere and sweet, well-meaning, and fun-loving. Even her seductiveness, which is gentle and non-threatening with the same hand-on-hip mannerisms used by the Carmens a century earlier, is not threatening.
Other leading artists are also at sea. The soprano Angel Blue, who plays the opera’s ingenue, swings to exhilaratingly free high notes, but lower down, her voice is a little softer and vibrates with vibrato. And the production cannot decide if it wants a meek Micaela or one that’s more assertive. Kyle Ketelsen, a bass-baritone, is a selfie-taking rodeo superstar rather than a traditional bullfighter like Escamillo. His sound is compact and resonant.
Daniele Rustioni’s conductor kept the train on track with a moderate and well-judged pace. The chorus also performed precisely but at the cost of intensity and sensuality. The intros for the third and the fourth acts gave glimpses of Bizet’s score in a wilder, more expansive, and more beautiful form.
Michael Levine’s sets are grandly sparse and uninspired. The first act is set outside an arsenal, not the cigarettes of the libretto, because a high chain link fence awkwardly pushes the action downstage. Carmen and her band steal a truck, which dominates both the second act and — crashing and burning down its side — the third. In the fourth act, skeletal black bleachers that resemble cages rotate ominously.
Modern touches are everywhere. Ann Yee’s choreography for a little second-act dance party echoes the finger-pumping-in-the-air style of the crowd at a pop show; the rodeo audience does the wave. Tom Scutt’s costumes are convincing Carhartt-esque evocations today’s border country residents; Guy Hoare’s lighting is a wild mix of naturalistic, stark, and frantic.
Cracknell aims to revolutionize the sexual dynamics of the opera, but the 21st century-ness is only on the surface. She says that “ending violence against women, and reimagining how violence is depicted in the media” is at the heart of the feminist movement.
This “Carmen” does not reimagine anything. Cracknell’s interviews suggest that she wants to highlight the larger structures of class and gender that make Carmen’s death a social tragedy rather than an individual crime. The director, however, struggles to make this distinction clear to the audience.
Cracknell’s choices make the work more provocative. The children’s choir mimics the changing guards in the opera’s first act. If you like, society is training these kids for militarism. Cracknell chose charm over threat and had the children sing directly to the crowd.
It’s wrongheaded, as Cracknell implies, to suggest that male chauvinism was suppressed in earlier “Carmen” performances and violence romanticized. Around 2000, just at the Met, I recall a performance of a Franco Zeffirelli old-fashioned staging in which the final scene gave the feeling of being able to spy through a window and witnessing a murder.
Richard Eyre’s production replaced the Zeffirelli and set the play during the Spanish Civil War. It introduced a sense of grimness that the characters were thrown together due to forces outside their control. It was a performance in which the audience felt Carmen’s gloomy fate rather than her stereotypical insouciance and sex appeal. The stakes were higher and more serious than on Sunday.
Cracknell’s British exoticizing is more sinister than the one that was used in the opera. The “Carmen,” like the Australian director Simon Stone’s 2022 Met production Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” is a glib portrayal of flyover states – the part of Spain that fascinates operagoers as Seville did in 19th century Paris.
It’s depressing and even damaging to look at Americans in such a superficial way, especially when an election is approaching. Our cultural institutions should instead be working hard to understand each other, particularly as the year of elections approaches.
