THEATER
Classic Stage Company
Carmen Jones
“Glorious. Breathlessly seductive. John Doyle’s transformative revival is sublime. Electrically choreographed by Bill T. Jones. Freshly orchestrated by Joseph Joubert. Clifton Duncan has a tenor that reminds you sex starts in the vocal chords. Booming David Aron Damane. Notably heartfelt Lindsay Roberts. Marvelous Soara-Joye Ross. The entire cast is first rate.”
– Ben Brantley, New York Times
– Ben Brantley, New York Times
“Smoking Hot! Anika Noni Rose makes a dazzling return to the NY Stage.”
– David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
– David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
“Incredible vocals all around is reason enough to simply lose yourself”
– Barbara Schuler, Newsday
– Barbara Schuler, Newsday
As the Second World War rages, parachute maker Carmen Jones wages her own quarrel involving an airman and a boxer. Using the score from Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen, this adaptation by Oscar Hammerstein II resets the story with an all African-American cast, and is the first major New York revival since its debut on Broadway 75 years ago.
Tony Award winner Anika Noni Rose (Caroline, or Change; A Raisin in the Sun; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) will play the title role in this production directed by CSC Artistic Director John Doyle (The Color Purple) and choreographed by Bill T. Jones (Fela!)
BOOK AND LYRICS BY OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II
BASED ON HENRI MEILHAC AND LUDOVIC HALÉVY’S ADAPTATION OF PROSPER MÉRIMÉE’S CARMEN
MUSIC BY GEORGES BIZET
CHOREOGRAPHED BY BILL T. JONES
DIRECTED BY JOHN DOYLE
BASED ON HENRI MEILHAC AND LUDOVIC HALÉVY’S ADAPTATION OF PROSPER MÉRIMÉE’S CARMEN
MUSIC BY GEORGES BIZET
CHOREOGRAPHED BY BILL T. JONES
DIRECTED BY JOHN DOYLE
‘Carmen Jones’ Review: The Return of a Troubled Love Story
Seventy-five years after its Broadway opening, Hammerstein’s once-popular, then derided adaptation of Bizet’s opera gets a slimmed-down revival.
Carmen Jones
Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th St.
$65-$125, 866-811-4111, extended through Aug. 19
$65-$125, 866-811-4111, extended through Aug. 19
So what happened to “Carmen Jones” in the meantime? It came to be regarded as a racially condescending period piece. James Baldwin famously roasted Preminger’s film version, dismissing it as “tasteless and vulgar…ludicrously false and affected” in a 1955 Commentary essay that was long taken to be the last word on Hammerstein’s transformation of Bizet’s opera into a tale of love and death in a World War II parachute factory. Not until Simon Callow’s hugely successful 1990 Old Vic revival did “Carmen Jones” start to be seen as something other than a creakily Tommish minstrel show, and even then, no one on this side of the Atlantic was willing to give it a go.
All credit, then, belongs to Mr. Doyle for realizing that Hammerstein’s English-language adaptation of the most popular of all 19th-century operas, far from being condescending, is in fact a completely straightforward translation of Bizet’s opera into contemporary terms. Part of the problem is that his meticulously spelled-out black dialect looks on the page like something out of an Uncle Remus story, while the lyrics, though perfectly serviceable, rarely stick in the mind (“You go for me an’ I’m taboo / But if you’re hard to get I go for you”). But Hammerstein’s book is as theatrically effective in its way as the original Henri Meilhac-Ludovic Halévy libretto, and Mr. Doyle and his cast have taken care to soft-pedal the dialect, with results that now sound to the ear rather more like August Wilson than “Porgy and Bess.”
David Aron Damane and Anika Noni Rose Photo: Joan Marcus
As for Mr. Doyle’s small-scale staging, performed by a cast of 10 and accompanied by a six-piece band, it is simple, subtle and wonderfully lucid, and features a performance of the title role by Anika Noni Rose for which the word “hot” is a wan understatement. No doubt you could strike matches off Ms. Rose’s blood-red dress, but you wouldn’t need to: They’d probably burst into flame all by themselves. I’ve seen a lot of Carmens in the opera house, most of them second-rate or worse, but I’ve never seen one that more fully embodied the Carmen of Bizet’s elegant, deadly masterpiece, an unabashedly sexual woman determined to live as she pleases no matter what it costs her—up to and including her life.
All this said, I wasn’t fully convinced by Mr. Doyle’s production, persuasive though it undeniably is. “Carmen” isn’t a grand opera by any means, but it isn’t a chamber opera, either. It needs more room to breathe, to tell its picturesque tale with a visual expansiveness that this “Carmen Jones” necessarily lacks—and it also demands a different kind of musical presentation. It was Hammerstein’s genius to realize that Bizet’s tuneful, richly colored score could be performed on a Broadway stage largely without change, and to insist that it be sung and played that way. I don’t have any problem with the not-quite-operatic singing in this production, but the scrawny little pit band, which sounds like a tea-shoppe orchestra, makes the score sound dainty and gutless.
The resulting lack of instrumental punch undercuts the explosive force of the final scene, in which Carmen Jones and Joe ( Clifton Duncan ), her hapless, hopeless lover, spiral downward toward the grave. Mr. Duncan is a very good singer, and I think he could make his gentle interpretation of the part work in a more propitious setting, but in the close quarters of Classic Stage’s 199-seat auditorium, I couldn’t help but recall with longing the way Plácido Domingo used to make you feel as though Don José were roaring toward his rendezvous with fate like an express train with Casey Jones at the throttle.
Don’t be put off by these cavils, though. Whatever its limitations, Mr. Doyle’s “Carmen Jones” works on its own scenically modest terms, and it will work even better if some shrewd producer moves it uptown—so long as Ms. Rose comes with it. She oozes star quality from every pore.
—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, is the author, most recently, of “Billy and Me.” Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com
