Review: Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera: Out With the Old and In With the New?
Clémentine Margaine as Carmen in a scene from Bizet's "Carmen." Photo: Nina Wurtzel / Met Opera
Challenging the relevancy of traditional opera in a changing world necessitates re-imagining and modernizing past operas for contemporary society. This approach is crucial to keep young audiences engaged and supportive of the arts, and to illustrate how historical topics can be translated and applied to current events. However, when does creating a modern interpretation of art fall short? It’s a fine line to walk between preserving traditions and reinvigorating older works with freshness and vibrancy. Sometimes, it does not work. Carrie Cracknell’s new production of Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City finds itself struggling to find this balance.
English director Carrie Cracknell makes her Met debut with a newly imagined Carmen for the 2023-2024 season. Her vision is supported by a powerhouse cast including mezzo-soprano Clémentine Margaine (Carmen), soprano Ailyn Pérez (Micaëla), tenor Michael Fabiano (Don José), bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green (Escamillo), and conductor Diego Matheuz.
Carmen first premiered at the Opéra Comique in Paris in 1875. It tells the story of a free-spirited, Romani enchantress, Carmen, and her lover, Don Jose. Their love affair is fiery and tumultuous, and their fate quickly reveals itself as the opera unfolds. Her strong and flirtatious presence was initially received as a scandal, but later the opera was revered for Georges Bizet’s masterful score. Its famous arias and main musical themes are widely recognized even by occasional theatergoers. With the curtain drawn, Matheuz leads his orchestra through a muscular overture—robust and full of life. As with most of the Met’s newer stagings, the use of lighting and projection plays an important part in the production. As the orchestra plays, shadowy figures are projected on the downstage scrim, showcasing a modern approach distinct from traditional overture presentations. It’s a subtle move, but one that the Met continues to capitalize on in its newer productions.
Like the operas, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, La Forza del Destino, and Don Giovanni, Carmen is originally set in Seville—a Spanish city opera composers associated with romanticism, exoticism, and disorder. In her reimagining, Cracknell displaces Carmen to a “contemporary American setting,” according to the Met. However, as audience members, we are never quite sure where we are. The opera opens with towering wire fences and border guards lining downstage. Factory women enter, clad in pink bonnets and work coats reminiscent of 1940s, “Rosie the Riveter.” They sport cigarettes initially, but later, as they exchange their pink robes for denim and crop tops and swap their cigarettes for iPhones, we are catapulted into a more present-day Americana.
Clémentine Margaine as Carmen, Michael Fabiano as Don José, and Wei Wu as Zuniga in Bizet's "Carmen." Photo: Nina Wurtzel / Met Opera
According to the Met, the contemporary set “updates the action…where the issues at stake seem powerfully relevant,” but Cracknell’s vision falls short. Set designer Michael Levine softens Carmen’s world by replacing the vibrancy of Seville with minimal and mundane sets. Bullfighting is swapped for rusty pickup trucks and rodeo stars—a change that echoes the Met’s modernized vision of Lucia di Lammermoor (2022), where automobiles and dimly lit neon signs dominated the stage, a now repetitive and stale approach to re-imagination.
Despite the tiresome set, musically, Carmen’s cast shines. Margaine (Carmen) tackles one of the most famous arias of the opera, Habanera, with a deliberate calmness—each note never wavering or falling out of meter. Pérez (Micaëla) delivers a crystal-clear performance of Micaëla’s aria in Act I, and Fabiano (Don José) and Green (Escamillo) also execute standout performances. The cast undoubtedly keeps this production afloat, but not with the help of choreographer Ann Yee.
Yee’s choreography, especially during the famous dance scene, Danse Boheme, now set in the back of a semi-truck, lacks the ferocity and percussiveness of flamenco. Instead, it was muddled by a seemingly improvised, flat interpretation of one of the most iconic moments of choreography in the opera. Dancers bobbed up and down, gripping utility ropes hanging in the back of the truck. As the orchestra approached its crescendo-a moment where the dancers and music should have been intensifying in unison-the music surged to a full-fledged climax, while the dancers remained directionless and monotonous.
In the final tragic scene of Carmen, Cracknell states, “We can’t portray the death of Carmen as a crime of passion…reimagining the depiction of violence against women lives at the center of the feminist movement.” In congruence with Cracknell, the crime was anything but passionate. There was no build-up, excitement, or emotion behind it. Rather, it culminated as an act of impulse and bluntness. However, in Carmen’s final struggle with her lover, Don José, it reads as an isolated crime, rather than a connection to a broader societal issue. The final image was empty, and finite, and unfortunately was unable to deliver a more impactful message.