Carmen at the Rodeo

Beginning my Substack with a review of an opera should be an appropriate way of indicating the level of pretentiousness you should expect from me overall.

If, like me, your idea of a nice evening out is to sit through a few hours of warbling, ham-fisted acting, and melodrama, a performance of Carmen is hard to ruin. The music is great, the setting is fun (bull fighting!), and it’s a tragedy where the characters all sort of have it coming.

Perhaps seeing this as a challenge, Carrie Cracknell’s production at the Met manages to make this opera cringe-inducing, terrible, and, worse yet, boring. The central characters in Carmen are a gypsy, a gendarme, and a matador. The US has neither a significant Roma population, nor an internal military, nor bullfights. But, that doesn’t seem to stop Cracknell from staging the thing in Texas (or, presumably Texas anyway since it’s desolate and some of the characters are wearing Texas state flag outfits). In what I assume is an effort to make some statement (though I’m unsure what) about immigration, policing, and the military, Bizet’s cigarette factory has become what looks like a bullet factory, or warehouse, or Pepsi bottling plant surrounded by razor wire. The gendarmes are now… I dunno, guys with guns forcing migrants to work in said bullet factory.  Never mind that jobs in a modern munitions plant would qualify as highly skilled labor and, for all the flaws in the US immigration system, that’s not what happens to migrants.

Skipping ahead a bit, Carmen is seducing Don José at a gas station (because that’s where Texans hang out, right?). Eventually, she climbs on top of a 1960s era gas pump and starts gyrating. At this point, did no one think to ask the director whether she’d ever seen actual humans flirt before? Or if she’d even been to Texas before setting her production there?

Mercifully, this scene eventually ends and we move to a legitimately cool staging in a semi-truck on the road. Just ignore the fact that this has no relation to the source material. The momentary “oh that’s kinda cool” feeling is quickly lost when Escamillo enters using a 2000s era Jaguar XK convertible as a chariot. Not to be a wet blanket but it’s inadvisable to ride in a convertible like Washington Crossing the Delaware on a highway. In his current iteration, Escamillo is a rodeo star/clown, which makes perfect sense since the lyrics are all about fighting a bull to death.

At some point, Micaëla (the opera’s requisite pointless character, even in a good production) comes to reason with Don José. The semi-truck is overturned and on fire. Was that on purpose or did they wreck? Alas, we’ll never know. The fact that they’re unloading it now suggests a wreck. The fact that it had been stuffed to the rafters with something like 347 gypsies but there are no injuries suggests that they just forgot to take their things out before setting the engine on fire for warmth.

By the time the final act came around, I realized I was thinking, “thank God, it’s almost over.” First though, we’re treated to a scene of, I’m guessing, what an English person imagines a rodeo and its fans look like (admittedly, maybe sort of accurate… but careful throwing stones since I’ve seen how chavs behave on their holidays in Amsterdam). As I’m regretting how much I spent on the tickets, in a final grasp as being edgy, the standard murder by gun is replaced with a brutal bludgeoning.

Why do all of this to your audience? There’s nothing wrong with art exploring contemporary America’s contradictions/hypocrisies/etc.In fact, it’s a crowded field. But, that’s not what Carmen is; the Spanish setting is pretty integral to the story so it doesn’t just port over to the US (a much better update was Richard Eyre’s staging in fascist era Spain, which did manage to be eerie, profound, and, importantly, still a good opera). It’s a bit like saying, “I want to do a modern version of Jane Eyre that really explores a middle-aged man’s psyche.” In case I’m not selling the sarcasm, please don’t take that as a suggestion.