The original Carmen Jones was a commercial project. Presented by bigtime showman, nightclub owner, and breezy columnist Billy Rose, ^(I)) it played at the Broadway Theatre, a large house, and was a boffo hit, running for 503 performances and inspiring wholehearted critical approval. It then went on a major-cities tour, and returned for three-week runs at the New York City Center in two subsequent seasons. Much later (1991) it was produced in London, where it was directed by Simon Callow and won an Olivier Award for its star (Wilhelminia Fernandez) and, absurdly, another for the show itself as “Best New Musical” (I do hope that Georges and Oscar made it to the ceremony). It came back to London’s South Bank as recently as 2007, with the London Philharmonic in the pit. Otto Preminger turned it into a very “opened-out” film—in Cinemascope, no less—in 1954.

So there’s a history with some pedigree here, and before considering what CSC brought us this year, we should remark that it was not the original Carmen Jones, which, though reduced in size and musical continuity from even the comique version of the Bizet/Meilhac/Halévy opera, was a large-scale show, cast with classically “legit” voices that were not miked, and with orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett and choral direction by Robert Shaw. ^(II)Given the dimensions of CSC and the directorial predilections of John Doyle (now the company’s Artistic Director), it was clear from the outset that this production would be by way of further contraction. For anyone familiar with the opera, this treatment produces an ongoing frustration that goes beyond the thin, punchless sound of the tiny instrumental ensemble or the loss of musical atmosphere provided by the wonderful interludes and choruses, to at least three dramaturgically substantive weakenings. The first is that, as I observed with respect to both Carmencita and La Tragédie, when one removes all the “bourgeois” elements—whether from sheer economic necessity, limitations of space, to “get back to” the story’s tragic spine, or from sociocultural/political conviction, it does not matter—one also removes all representation of the social conditions against which the story of these two fated outsiders is played. There’s no normative world for them to be the exceptions to, no set of conventions for them to push against. The second is that when the musical structures that are designed to fulfill dramatic actions are fragmented or left unfinished (and particularly when the suspenseful build-up to a crucial confrontation is at the moment of truth severed from the vocal/musical world and returned to that of spoken dialogue, as happens several times), the level of heightened reality we’ve started to believe in dives straight onto the rocks. Just when we’ve stopped asking “Why in the world are they singing now?”, we have to ask “Why in the world have they stopped?” The third, related to the first, has to do with the class/race uniformity of the updated stage world Hammerstein created.