Carmen opera houston full#
I suppose this type of treatment is OK as a Greatest Hits compilation, or as a pale substitute when a full stage mounting isn't feasible. They drift in and out, functioning less as character motivation as in Bizet, than used as background score to Brook's condensed, simplified expressionism. Though cut, rearranged, and re-orchestrated by Marius Constant, the opera's famous numbers are somewhat intact (Carmen's "Habanera" and "Seguidilla,"Jose's "Flower Song," Escamillo's "Toreador Song," Micaela's "I am not afraid"). There are no Seville townspeople, no soldiers, no kids chorus, no brawling cigar factory girls, no gypsy smugglers, no bullfight parade. Needless to say, this 80-minute intimate piece dispenses with the opera's colorful mise-en-scene, paring the sumptuous Spanish tapestry down to a threadbare quartet and two speaking roles. Tragédie doesn't shock, so much as stupefy. Along with contemporary Robert Wilson, Brook's visual flair is always striking, but his hot-house ideas tend to shock more than illuminate. This one-act Reader's Digest version from 1981, closing out Opera in the Heights' season, is an unholy mash-up of the opera, Prosper Merimee's 1845 novella, and tons of directorial flourishes from the radical director who caused a theater stir with such Royal Shakespeare Company productions as the inmates-run-the-asylum Marat/Sade (1964) and the white box, acrobatic A Midsummer Night's Dream (1970). First he had to die prematurely during the opera's premiere run at Paris's Opera-Comique, never knowing what a smash hit he had created now, he has to endure this. Do you hear that whirring deep underground? It's composer Georges Bizet spinning in his grave after the beating his immortal opera masterwork Carmen gets under ham-fisted director/auteur Peter Brook in his adaptation La Tragédie de Carmen.