Word: carmens
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Tosca set in 1944? Carmen in an urban dump? The place to go for innovative opera productions is not the U. S. but Europe...
...Opera (ENO) unveiled Director Jonathan Miller's production of Puccini's Tosca set during World War II and played in the style of one of Hollywood's gritty, black-and-white melodramas of the period. Earlier this season, the same company presented a Mad Max version of Bizet's Carmen by David Pountney that replaced castanets and mantillas with feral children darting amid junked American automobiles. In Paris, Producer Seth Schneidman staged Strauss's Elektra as a dream-theory psychodrama, freely mixing images of Greek antiquity and 19th century Europe...
...conservative productions, sometimes elephantine ones like Franco Zeffirelli's La Boheme and Tosca, that reinforce the company's role as a musical museum. Occasionally, the rival New York City Opera makes a cautious foray into modernism, often with indifferent results -- Frank Corsaro's tepid Spanish Civil War version of Carmen, for example...
Pountney's Carmen took an even more radical view. Rather than discovering a parallel setting, the director simply created one, reveling in the anachronism. The gypsy girls, now prostitutes, conducted their business in the back seats of cars, and the bullfighters in the final act made their entrance in motley cholo low riders. So far, so shocking -- but only if one believes that Carmen is about the working conditions in Spanish cigarette factories, instead of sexual obsession, violence and death. In fact Pountney did not go far enough. Micaela -- a character not found in Merimee's gritty original novella...
...were several variations on the bustle, insouciant and not very subtle. One bouffant day costume featured layers of huge polka dots overlapping like the tiles on a roof. And the hats! Florid Creole cones, luscious layers of peonies topped by an upended straw boater. Befruited skimmers and lacy lampshades. Carmen Miranda would have loved it. So would Elsa Schiaparelli, the imp of '30s couture...