Aigul Akhmetshina’s Carmen has everything for the role. Picture © Camilla Greenwell
Carmen is the good-time ‘bad girl’ everyone loves to love. The 1875 premiere of Bizet’s opéra-comique (an opera with spoken dialogue rather than a comic opera) was an astonishing flop, but Carmen quickly established itself in the repertoire of every company of the world. It is a box-office staple at a theatre like Covent Garden, where the ratio of box-office income to government subsidy is perilously high.
Damiano Michieletto’s new Royal Opera staging, which opened last Friday, is the fifth I have seen at this theatre during the last 50 years - all of them problematic. Its predecessor, by the sought-after Australian director Barrie Kosky, had the shortest shelf-life of all - a mere 30 performances, spread over the 2018 and 2019 seasons. It was nothing but trouble from the get-go, when it became clear that the kind of international stars expected at Covent Garden appeared reluctant to endure its exigencies. Finding replacement Carmens and Don Josés at relatively short notice would have been a perennial headache for the casting department.
Michieletto’s longstanding set designer, Paolo Fantin, certainly makes things easier for the inevitable cast changes this new production will have to endure. Already the first run of 16 performances is double-cast and, in the case of Micaëla (Don José’s childhood sweetheart), treble-cast. All four acts are on a level acting-field. That may be good for singers, but it is questionable as an interpretation of the stage directions - no mountain hideout for the Act 3 smugglers - laid down by Bizet’s librettists, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy - but no self-respecting modern regisseur gives a damn about those any more.
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