Skip to main content
On opening night Feb. 6, mezzo-soprano Sandra Piques Eddy played the title character as a sexy gypsy, barefoot and hiking up her peasant skirt. In her famous "Habanera," she offhandedly seduces a fiercely brooding military man named Don José (Chad Shelton). When he grabs Carmen's arm, you feel the heat between them. After a torrid affair, the free-spirited Carmen moves right along to the glamorous bullfighter Escamillo (Eric Greene), a lady's man secure enough in his masculinity to sport pink tights while spearing bulls.
Don José isn't down with his lady getting speared by the toreador, however. He's equally conflicted when circumstances force him to desert his platoon and live the life of a smuggler in the mountains outside Seville. And although he's crazy for Carmen, he feels guilty for not returning to his village to attend to his dying mother and marry his loving but mousy admirer, Micaëla (Jennifer Forni). In the final act, tensions culminate when Don José stalks Carmen, confronting her outside one of Escamillo's bullfights. It's Carmen, not the bull, who gets gored, though, when she refuses Don José's advances and in a fit of madness he cuts her throat. This is juicy stuff, folks.
In this fatalistic fable, the singers resplend like Spanish sunshine. No one among the cast has a huge voice, but the main players held their own amid Keller Auditorium's unforgiving acoustics. Ultimately this opera lives and dies by the chemistry between Carmen and Don José, and Eddy and Shelton scorched one another and the audience with their combustive friction as the star-crossed lovers. They gave themselves over to their characters' ardor, but didn't let their tones turn harsh when the emotions got ugly. Greene is a lighter, more fluttery baritone than we normally hear in the role of Escamillo, but he wins points for singing a high F in the "Toreador Song" while leaping off a table. Forni provided the night's plushest star turn with her expansive phrasing and round, yet incisive tone in the opulent aria "Je dis que rien ne m'épouvante."
The singers delivered their spoken dialogue in convincing French, with plenty of nasal vowels and swallowed "r'"s. Conductor George Manahan paced the orchestra briskly but allowed the singers breathing room when their big moments called for it. Thanks to stage director Eric Einhorn, the action flowed organically and with verve, while designer Eduardo V. Sicango's costumes captured the 19th-century Spanish style without dipping into parody. An unexpected pleasure came courtesy of two international-caliber flamenco dancers, Glenda Sol Koeraus and Antonio Granjero. Their dance between the third and fourth acts was so precise and sensual that the audience's applause literally almost stopped the show.
Part of what makes exceptional opera so rewarding is its near-unbearable catharsis. To live through stories that engage primal emotions such as lust and jealousy, embodied by voices so powerful that they fill large halls without microphones, is an experience that spits you out feeling oddly cleansed. Most of us will never kill a lover who has betrayed us. But when the act is performed with this much gusto, just being in the audience feels almost as powerful as the real thing.
SEE IT: Carmen is at the Keller Auditorium, 222 SW Clay St., 248-4335, on Thursday and Saturday, Feb. 12 and 14. 7:30 pm. $25-$270.
WWeek 2015