Word: carmens
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...Carmen is a tattooed nightclub singer in a Tina Turner wig who smuggles Uzis after hours. Escamillo, her bullfighting boyfriend, looks as if he's been getting fashion tips from Wayne Newton's tailor. The orchestra is seated onstage, midway between five video screens and six hydraulic lifts; the conductor wears a leather vest, and the director's credits include a stint as Mick Jagger's choreographer. And everybody is miked, from the tenor to the timpani player...
This is opera, right? Absolutely, says David Gockley, general director of the Houston Grand Opera, which has mounted an up-to-the-second production of Georges Bizet's Carmen to show off its new portable outdoor stage, a $1.4 million innovation designed to get the much admired company out of its fancy downtown theater and into the lives of Houstonians who don't know Don Jose from Donald Duck. Gockley calls it "nothing less than a new way to produce opera." Irreverent locals dubbed the show Carmen a-go-go but turned out to cheer. More than 7,000 paying...
Though the company billed its new Carmen as the next best thing to a rock concert, the results were closer in style to a rip-roaring Broadway show, an impression strengthened by the use of Bizet's original opera-comique version, in which the dialogue is spoken rather than sung, and a refreshingly colloquial English translation by Sheldon Harnick (Fiddler on the Roof). Updated it was, but dumbed down it wasn't. Assaf made her dramatic points with crisp simplicity and no pandering whatsoever. No less direct was the Carmen of mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzman, a fire-eating singing actress...
...stage will be moved indoors for a production of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, starring Frederica von Stade. Several other opera houses have expressed interest in this new approach, and no doubt similar stages will soon be under construction. But the best thing about Houston's contemporary Carmen is not so much the modular stage, impressive though it is, as what Assaf has done with it. How do you get twentysomethings to fall for opera? The answer is the same now as it was a century ago: make it real...
Perhaps no one employed this strategy with more profound results than the incomparable Billie Holiday, who paved the way for an entire generation of black women vocal stylists, including Carmen McRae, Ella Fitzgerald and R.-and-B. singers like Aretha Franklin. Although Holiday, who counted Bessie Smith among her most important musical influences, was not a blues singer per se, her music was deeply rooted in the blues tradition. As a jazz musician working primarily with the idiom of white popular song, Holiday used the blues tradition to inject suggestions of perspectives more complicated than those the lyrics themselves contained...