Prior
to Wednesday night, I had never attended “the opera”. This is for a multitude
of reasons. First, for my outdoor loving, gardening, quasi-backwoods-living
family, getting all dressed up for an event in a language we couldn’t
understand while happily dishing out boatloads of money has never sounded like
the most ideal way to spend time. Even further, it was an art form I felt belonged
to a bygone era, without any sort of applicability for the modern day. That
conception was mostly based in some naïve belief that a type of theatre that
presented its art through indistinguishable syllables in a foreign language
accompanied by archaic plotlines, emotions, and composers with the names of old
white men was entirely passé and blasé. And, from what I had seen through arts
magazines and reviews, very little was being done by the opera community to
combat that stereotype. This all stood steadfastly true until I saw Carmen as put on by the Royal Swedish
Opera.
Carmen was written by George Bizet in 1875
and tells the story of an eponymous Spanish-Gypsy heroine of amorphous moral
and sexual character who initially falls for a military man named Don José,
ultimately goes for the celebrated and popular toreador named Escamillo, and is
then killed by Don José for her “treachery” and “dishonesty”. It is a tale of
lust, love, immorality and amorality, and focuses on the lives of the everyday Spaniard
circa 1820. Today, beyond its still-applicable themes, it boasts two of the
most famous opera arias ever penned – the “Habanera” and the “Toreador” song –
which makes it a perennially produced show around the world. For these reasons,
along with the fact that my high school’s symphony played the Carmen Suite my senior year, I was
particularly excited to lose my opera virginity to Bizet’s Carmen. Great music, incredible set, and unique plot were sure to
combine for an unforgettable evening, right? Only in part.
The
evening did turn out to be quite unforgettable but not necessarily in the
manner I first imagined. My seat was impeccable, for one. The Royal Opera House
is a terrific and intimately maintained Neo-Classical building from the late 19th
Century with gilded decoration and lush velvet upholstery, for another. The
entire atmosphere of the space buzzed with excitement and energy, even if the
average age of the attendee was upwards of 65. There was a different level of
engagement present in the building that I hadn’t experienced before at any
other creative performance, which surprised me from the outset. That same excitement
infected me as well, and I found myself quickly gaining in anticipation as the
curtain rose. It was quickly replaced by a nagging sense of disappointment.
It
was to be a proverbial “modern interpretation”.
Modern
adaptations of theatre (and opera by extension), in my experience, are best
done when they’re done fully, completely, and almost to a fault. For example,
Jean Annouilh’s Antigone represents
the best of this precept. Although it is heavily based on Sophocles’ Antigone, Annouilh takes full artistic agency
and essentially recreates the play from the ground up. His version is full with
anachronisms from card games to coffee cups, utilizes modern language, and comes
from a standpoint that is fully updated to match the times. Carmen and the showmakers took some
creative agency and risks, without taking enough of them. They walked to the
edge of the canyon of “modern adaptation” without ever pushing themselves over
the edge and into actual, meaningful adaptive critique. They did almost enough. Close, but no cigar.
The
costuming was erratic and inconsistent, drawing on clothing that was
reminiscent of 1950s Cuba, Xena: The
Warrior Princess, Sweden’s 2015 military uniforms, Grease, recess at Jordan Middle School in Palo Alto, and countless
other seemingly random items. Similarly, the choreography was figuratively “all
over the place”, except that it wasn’t literally “all over the place” – 80% of
the opera seemed to take place in the same 15 square meter box on a stage that
is much larger than that. All the
while, the pit orchestra played the exact same pieces that Bizet wrote nearly
150 years ago, and the opera singers sung in a manner that suggested there was
nothing different about this production of Carmen
when compared to any other production of Carmen.
How can these incongruities coexist in the same production? To put it lightly,
they couldn’t.
For
me, the largest perpetrator in this overwhelmingly confusing production was the
set design. Through the course of performance history, set designs have run the
gamut from the impossibly ornate and nuanced to the wonderfully and/or
mystically minimalist. The set of Carmen
definitely tried to be the latter, but missed the mark just enough so as to make
it an unrecoverable mistake.
Physically,
the set was three enormously tall walls cut with doors and windows with
operable parts, which allowed for the space to be reconfigured as the designers
pleased[1]. While valid in concept,
the execution of the space itself is part of the most offensive portions of the
set. For one, it appeared to be made of unfinished particle board or
medium-density fiberboard, which is typically found in cheap Target tool
cabinets or most inexpensive American IKEA coffee tables and dressers.
Economical and easy to cut? Yes. Appropriate for setting a scene that is
supposed to be Seville, Spain? Not quite. Further, the construction appeared to
be quite shoddy from my vantage point – I could see burn marks from the saw
cuts and there was a relentless grid that connected all the door- and
window-holes. At no point did it seem that this was intended to be Spain
specifically, which is an enormously important plot point and explanatory
device for the opera – Carmen is a
French opera about Spain, about being Spanish, about love in Spain, and nothing
should be able to take away from that, least of all the set. While I appreciate
the minimalist approach, the context was completely wrong when paired with the
other creative decisions made by the production team. Even with the added
drapery, colored backdrops, and/or opening and closing of the doors and
windows, the set felt uninspired, irrelevant, and totally unimportant to the drama
happening on stage, which goes against the core principle of good set design. The
set ought to provide a space for the actors to enter a mental place conducive
to acting.
Perhaps
my vitriolic critique of Carmen is
partially due to my complete ineptitude at understanding either language that
presented the opera – French (singing) and Swedish (supertitles). Without any
line-by-line translation, I was left to sorting through the reading I had done
prior to the event and the small English synopsis graciously provided in the
program to the show. Had I understood French or Swedish, I definitely would
have gained more nuances from the show that explicated plotline, fleshed out the
romantic angst, and given me a wholly more complete understanding of the show. That
said, I don’t think that linguistic capacity would have alleviated the personal
angst I got from the set design. Verbally or not, the set presented in the
Royal Swedish Opera’s take on Carmen
gave absolutely no sense of place or space, and was underutilized, poorly
crafted, and brought nearly nothing of merit to the show. As part of a larger
meta-narrative on operatic adaptation, the set design fits in well. However, by
only achieving base level success of adaptation, the set design is immediately
shown to be flawed and ultimately a poor choice for the show. I fundamentally
believe the showmakers were as confused when they were designing the
performance as I was when I left the Opera.
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