Chicago Opera Theater's 'Carmen' makes

Bizet less busy

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Those with a passion for the minimalist aesthetic will be enthralled by "La Tragedie de Carmen" -- the pared-to-the-bone, cut-to-the-chase, reassembled, spectacle-free, "sex, death, fate and a loudspeaker" version of the Bizet classic now in a Chicago Opera Theatre production at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance.

Is less ultimately more? That is not really the question here. This reenvisioned take on a classic is a thing unto itself -- a lean, mean, femme fatale machine in which four men are quickly chewed up and spit out, and the woman who has undone them understands that she, too, is doomed.

As reworked by the 20th century Romanian composer Marius Constant, and adapted by the French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere and British director Peter Brook, this experiment in condensation and modernization, first produced in 1981, has a running time of just 90 minutes, a cast of seven characters, no chorus, no dancing, and a chamber orchestra (under the fleet direction of Alexander Platt) that even briefly cedes its live sound to a cleverly inserted gramophone recording. Crimes of passion unfold with dispatch, and emotions, too, are intense but mostly shortlived. A lone cello signals the start of the story. A haunting drumbeat version of the "Habanera" finishes it off.
Director Andrew Eggert has set his production during the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s -- an appropriately brutal moment in history when the fate of all Europe, not just one man-devouring gypsy woman, is at stake. Death is in the air (though Eggert makes no reference to the war), and designer Carol Bailey's bare, stone-walled set (starkly lit by Christine Binder) suggests the streets are as bleak as a barracks or prison.

This "Carmen" is a realistic acting vehicle as much as a musical one, and some of the performers fare better than others. Sandra Piques Eddy is vocally solid but her gypsy chanteuse lacks an essential spark. She gives us a hard, impulsive, calculating woman, but is short on the seductive physical ease and abandon that make her irresistible to so many different men. (Her costume, a rather conservative red dress in the style of a proper secretary of the period, doesn't help.)

With his lustrous voice and good looks, Noah Stewart's Don Jose is absolutely superb, both vocally and dramatically. Here is a handsome but naive mama's boy, far from home in an army posting in Seville, and while Carmen is his initiation into worldliness, he is a hapless romantic -- volatile, jealous and lost. Stewart brings a redemptive beauty to the opera's final moments as he futilely begs Carmen to take him back.

To the role of Escamillo (the toreador is a prizefighter in this telling), Michael Todd Simpson brings a stylish, pomaded, Valentino-like panache. Brian Herriott is the stolid army officer Zuniga. And Steppenwolf veteran Rick Snyder makes the most of dual non-singing roles as both Lillas Pastia, the tavern owner, pimp and wartime profiteer, and Garcia, Carmen's angry husband. Krenare Gashi's crystalline voice and delicate looks are ideal for Micaela, the hometown girl who cannot save Don Jose.

 

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