Carmen: A brief critique of the recent SFO production
The San Francisco Opera’s staging of Francesca Zambello’s Carmen has beautiful voices, superb singing, singers admirably suited to their roles and big, blocky sets that dominate the stage, pushing all the cast into a small space downstage. These featureless massive blocks of adobe, with a low ramp to nowhere built into the central wall, are not a cigarette factory or Lillas Pastia’s inn or a smuggler’s hideout in the mountains or a bull fight arena, yet they are made to serve all these scenes and don’t succeed in any of them. They are completely charmless and don’t seem to serve any purpose aside from having a few people peeking over the top of the wall on occasion.
Given the confined space, the number of people that are packed into it creates a confusion of bodies, which becomes an absolute melee when the fight scene outside the cigarette factory breaks out. There is too much going on to keep track of, and why take the focus off the drama of the lead characters? It seems almost perverse to confine the action to just part of the stage and then fill it with as many people as possible.
The scene at Lillas Pastia’s tavern wants to be a circus, a Broadway show and Cirque du Soleil all at the same time. We have acrobats, a chorus line, and an actual horse on stage all of which has nothing to do with the powerful tragedy and drama of Carmen. It’s distracting and not in the character of the opera. The intimacy of the gathering in the tavern and the smoldering sensuality of Carmen, “I’ll Dance the Seguidilla and Drink Some Manzanilla,” is lost in the frenzied activity. In every other production I’ve seen, Frasquita, Carmen and Mercédès dance and joke and celebrate their sisterhood. Here they’re just part of the chorus line.
In the smuggler’s hideout in the mountains, which contains half a village of people (some hideout), when Escamillo comes looking for Carmen and Don Jose challenges him, there is suddenly a semi-circle of ten or more rifles pointed not just at Escamillo but at the audience. If the idea was to discomfit the audience in the Orchestra section, it worked. Again, it was more than what was needed.
The stabbing of Carmen was gratuitously violent with repeated thrusts. It’s more likely that Don Jose would have recoiled in horror from the first strike. But I guess you just can’t get too violent nowadays.
The singers should be the focus and everything should be in support of them, not competing with them or distracting from them. What was Ms. Zambello thinking?