OPERA REVIEW: CARMEN -29 Jan'10
Rating: 3 out of 5

COC’s CARMEN too tawdry

JOHN COULBOURN, QMI Agency
29 Jan'10

In adapting a portion of Prosper Merimee’s novella to the operatic stage, composer Goerges Bizet and his collaborators, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy, gave the modern world a prototype for the liberated woman.

She’s called CARMEN — and as sketched by Bizet, et al, in the opera of the same name, she’s a woman who knows what she wants and is prepared to go after it — rules be damned. She’s smart, she’s tough and she’s sexy as hell.

In other words, she’s an intimidating creature, which may account in no small part for the fact she has so often been painted in a long list of productions — most of them directed, perhaps not surprisingly, by men — as some sort of tawdry Gypsy tart.
Now, we can add the Canadian Opera Company’s latest revisiting of the work — this production opened Wednesday on the stage of the Four Seasons Centre — to that aforementioned list, featuring as it does a heroine with the soul not of a feral tigress, but of a table dancer instead.

To be certain, mezzo soprano Rinat Shaham sounds the part and even looks it as well — so much so that a few of Francois St-Aubin’s full-speed-ahead-and-watch-those-torpedoes costumes could most definitely be considered lily gilding.

But what director Justin Way fails to grasp in this wooden and too-often self-conscious staging is that, in much the same way as water never has to try to be wet, Carmen as written never has to try to be sexy. And in insisting Shaham wrap and writhe herself around poles and straddle chairs to seduce tenor Bryan Hymel’s lugubrious Don Jose and bass baritone Paul Gay’s wooden Escamillo, is a little like using an atom bomb to kill a mosquito.

This is kindling she’s trying to set aflame, after all, not a forest.

In fairness, Way and his entire cast are fighting an an uphill battle here, impeded by the production’s Latin-American, modern-dress design that speaks most loudly of a world of cheaply made B-movies. First off, it’s a setting that demands that a character shaped in the world and morals of 1875 inhabit a world a century on — a world where far more women have embraced Carmen’s egalitarian approach to things sexual, thus forcing her character further into trollop mode in order to stand out from the flock. Even worse, it’s a set that somehow manages to rob the opera’s most intimate scenes of their ardour, while at the same time making the crowd scenes feel like they’re all taking place on a packed rush-hour streetcar.Sadly, even the boldly abstract curtain that impressed in the production’s first outing had lost some of its impact in this opening-night performance, thanks to technical glitches that seemed to threaten to derail it.

Happily, there are a few highlights in a production that rarely rises above the pedestrian, not the least of which is soprano Jessica Muirhead’s achingly simple take on the peasant girl Micaela, whose world is torn apart by her beloved’s obsession with the Gypsy girl of title. Add some nice work from tenor Adam Luther and baritone Justin Welsh as a pair of smugglers, and from sopranos Teiya Kashahara and Lauren Segal as a pair of Gypsy maids, and it becomes an evening of memorable moments — particularly when backed by the COC Chorus, the Canadian Children’s Opera Company and the COC Orchestra, under the brisk baton of conductor Rory Macdonald.

Under Way’s direction, however, this Carmen is not a soaring story of a tragic heroine prepared to die for her independence, but rather just another tawdry tale of domestic abuse carried to reprehensible extremes.

CARMEN
At the Four Seasons Centre
Directed by Justin Way
Conducted by Rory Macdonald