Word: brooked
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Mimi likes red. So Brook Hollow is red this night. Hundreds of red and white balloons. Huge sprays of red gladiolas. The tablecloths are red, as are the matchbook covers with MIMI emblazoned on them. So too are the rubies surrounded by diamonds in Mimi's necklace and earrings. Neiman-Marcus allowed Mimi the run of the jewelry department to borrow anything she wanted for her ball. "It was real special," she admits...
...from the rumbles and whistles of the Gare du Nord. Its inside walls are crumbling. Its seats are long, hard wooden benches, and the stage is nothing more than a dirt floor. Yet this unprepossessing site is currently selling the hottest ticket in Paris: to Director Peter Brook's radical version of Carmen, Georges Bizet's classic opera of love and death in old Seville...
...Prosper Mérimée novella. Gone are the choruses of soldiers and cigarette girls, as well as most of the opera's secondary characters. Instead, the focus is on the hotheaded Basque dragoon Don José and his fatal passion for the dark-eyed gypsy Carmen. Brook has even given the work a new title: La Tragédie de Carmen...
This is a time of startling directorial innovations in opera. Patrice Chéreau's controversial Bayreuth staging of Wagner's Ring cycle (1976) featured Rhine maidens frolicking near a hydroelectric dam and Siegfried wearing a dinner jacket. But what Brook has done goes beyond accepted notions of radicalism. Essentially, he has recomposed Bizet's masterpiece, discarding whole sequences, changing the order of arias, even putting the overture near the end. The implicit arrogance of all this does not trouble Brook. "Opera is not a musical contract on paper, something between attorneys," he says. "The whole essence...
...What Brook has produced is not Carmen, but a critical commentary on Carmen-an opera about an opera. In this he has succeeded. In the 550-seat Bouffes du Nord, the drama has more power than it possibly could in a 3,000-seat opera house. Brook has chosen his singers as much for their acting skills as for their voices. By tightening the plot he creates dramatic situations beyond anything envisioned by Bizet's librettists (Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy) or even by Mérim&233;e. In this version, Carmen and Micaela...