Sure, a security guard walks by during Carmen and José’s final confrontation and doesn’t intervene. And at the end, the women in the rodeo stands rise in solidarity while the men remain seated. But it’s too little, too late for anything approaching structural criticism, or even just interesting, vibrant theater.
In fact, some of Cracknell’s decisions make the work less provocative. The children’s choir imitates the changing of the guard in the opera’s opening act; If you will, society is training them for militarism. But instead of doubling down on him, Cracknell has the kids sing directly to the audience, choosing charm over menace.
And it is a mistake to imply, as Cracknell does, that machismo has been suppressed and violence romanticized in previous productions of “Carmen.” Only at the Met do I recall a performance by an old-fashioned Franco Zeffirelli staged around the year 2000, a few years after its premiere, in which the deadly final scene actually provided the dizzying sensation of peering through a window into a murder, with all the attendant feelings of horror, excitement and shame.
Richard Eyre’s production, which replaced Zeffirelli in 2009 and set the play at the time of the Spanish Civil War, introduced a pervasive sense of sadness, of characters united by forces beyond their control. That was a show where you certainly felt Carmen’s unsettling fate more than her stereotypical carefreeness or sex appeal. He made the stakes of the opera both lighter and darker than Sunday.
And by removing the opera’s exoticism of Spain as a playground for bandits and gypsies, Cracknell, who is British, introduces a more insidious exoticism. As in Australian director Simon Stone’s 2022 Met staging of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” the chill of this “Carmen” is its simplistic depiction of the so-called flyover states, the part of the country which fascinates the opera elite as much as Seville. 19th century Paris fascinated.
There is something depressing, even corrosive, about taking such a superficial look at our fellow Americans, when (especially as an election year begins) our cultural institutions should be trying to help us understand each other.
Carmen
Through January 27, and returning in the spring with a new cast, at the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan; metopera.org.
