Love Songs

Carmen Jones at the Classic Stage Company

 Clifton Duncan and Anika Noni Rose in Carmen Jones.

            There isn’t much scenery in John Doyle’s new production of Carmen Jones, opening June 27^th at the Classic Stage Company, but then there doesn’t need to be.  It’s not that the spare, factory-style scenic design necessarily suggests a pavilion, or a boxing ring, or even really a factory – it’s the music, so enormous, substantial, and rewarding it dwarfs everything else.  In 1943 Oscar Hammerstein II adapted Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen to the contemporary American South and populated it with black servicemen and factory workers, thus providing the deftest-yet translation of Bizet’s French lyrics into any language or idiom, and introducing Bizet’s genius to a new generation.  And what genius!  The music is richer than anything on Broadway – perhaps anything that’s ever been on Broadway – and it is, in this incarnation, impeccably sung.

            One’s experience of this Carmen Jones, the first major production in New York since the original, seventy-five years ago, will probably depend on one’s tolerance for opera.  Because, though populated by musical theater performers – notably the smoldering Anika Noni Rose (perfect) and the massively charismatic Clifton Duncan (singing brilliantly but falling just short of his usual acting standards) – the emotions are as heightened and the arias as overwrought as anything at the Met.  For the musical theater audiences who will likely be coming to see it, it will take getting used to – especially in the last half-hour of this ninety-five-minute compression of the opera, when the more familiar tunes (“Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum,” “Stan’ Up and Fight,” and that glorious overture) have passed.

            But that’s because operas are simple – and luckily director Doyle (also the Classic Stage’s artistic director) does simple better than anyone else.  His pared-down productions of Sweeney Todd and The Color Purple did boffo business on Broadway, and his recent Pacific Overtures (also at the Classic Stage) came close to the divine.  Here, with a cast of ten and an orchestra of six, he delineates with a surgeon’s care the fundamental concern of the piece – prophecy.  In Hammerstein’s magnificent translation of the Habanera, “Dat’s Love,” Carmen (Rose) sings, “If I chase you, then you gets caught / And once I got you, I go my way… Don’t say I didn’t tell you true.”  The poor aspiring airman who she chases in this case, Joe (Duncan), proceeds to ignore the warning entirely.  Carmen, on the other hand, sees a tarot card predicting her own death and steels for it with something close to dignity.  This is an opera, that most eminently predictable of genres, and yet, fascinatingly, the ending hinges on which of the characters are able to see it coming.

            This Carmen Jones is slightly wooden and slightly dusty, and succumbs to a few of the plotted oddities that Hammerstein presumably found it difficult to avoid in his transposition.  (Where exactly, in the Chicago of 1943, was there a swanky country club exclusively for black patrons?)  But at its best, like in Rose’s strikingly sensual “Dat’s Love” and Soara-Joye Ross’s infectious, audience-invading “Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum,” it’s also fun.  Since the show is done in the round, one can watch the faces of the audience as the tunes that have permeated the world’s collective consciousness begin, and it’s as if an ear-to-ear grin passes over the face of the theater itself.  This production manages to sustain that smile for at least a solid hour, and that’s not nothing.

            The real joy, as always in this 199-seat theater, is the discovery that any production, no matter how high-minded, can be made intimate, and gloriously so.  To use a cliché, one truly feels part of the action: Factory workers call over the audience’s heads.  In dance numbers, the cast members murmuringly and glowingly encourage one another: “Yeah,” “That’s it.”  As the cast were setting up scenery at the performance I saw, Justin Keyes (who plays a boxer’s manager) slipped; Ross called “I saw that,” and he responded, saucily, “Saw what?”  You see more of this ten-person ensemble than you can hope to see of the dozens on a Broadway stage, and just as Doyle made his Pacific Overtures a showcase for New York Asian stage actors, so he does here with superbly talented African-Americans who never miss a note or a cue.  The original Carmen Jones was a haven for black stage talent who weren’t being cast elsewhere; this Carmen Jones is much the same.  Oscar Hammerstein, wherever he is, probably just got a burst of pride; Georges Bizet, rightly so, is probably already proud enough.