Although I was raised in the era of the Rodgers/Hammerstein musicals, I hadn’t thought much about Oscar the Younger of late. So when the same friend who recently asked me why I was going to see Carmen Jones also observed that Hammerstein was very concerned with race, it took me a moment to nod and say “Yes, that’s true.” And from Show Boat to South Pacific to The King and I and Flower Drum Song, the theme of transcending interracial boundaries is certainly one he pursued with persistence and as much depth as the genre he wrote for would allow. But Carmen Jones isn’t an interracial or color-blind-casting show. It’s an all-black show. At the midwar time of its premiere, in the still-segregated U.S. military in which it’s set and in which Joe’s (José’s) ambition to be a “flyboy” would have meant the Tuskegee Airmen, it’s almost the fantasy evoked by the old “When you’re in love, the whole world’s (insert the ethnic/religious/gender group of your choice)” jokes—jokes with an ache in them. So Hammerstein’s  progressive concern with race was not in this instance expressed by the character relations or social pressures shown in his book and lyrics, but in the very act of adapting an iconic European “period” work for contemporaneous black performers. The statement’s power was augmented by patriotic sentiment—Carmen‘s tobacco factory becomes a parachute factory; in the opening chorus “chacun vient, chacun passe” becomes a refrain of “win the war, win the war.” The resonances for audiences of the time were loud, the “relevance” spelled-out.

All this was admirable, noble, on the right side of history. It lowers the dramatic temperature, though. While Carmen could until fairly recently have been termed an “all-white show,” it makes ethnic and class distinctions that are crucial to its arc of tragedy. Carmen is a Gypsy; José is from a region and culture that is still trying, sometimes violently, to define its independence from Spain. They bond as outsiders who recognize each other, deeply, at first meeting. His backstory includes violence, forced abandonment of a widowed mother and small-town sweetheart, and the absolute necessity of “staying clean” in the army, the last refuge of many scoundrels. That she sees something in him that draws her as other men have not is clear not so much from the fact that she keeps her end of the transactional bargain—that’s Gypsy code of honor—as from her declaration of love and the incredulity with which it is received by her companions. When she rejects him for Escamillo, she chooses not just a rich, handsome guy, but elevation and assimilation into the dominant culture she has always defined herself against, with the alliance sanctified at its highest ceremony. ^(I)The tension between, and interpenetration of, these worlds is a powerful conditioning element in the opera, as well as a shrewd entertainment parlay. As Jon Alan Conrad put it in his chapter on Carmen in the Metropolitan Opera Encyclopedia of Opera on Video, ” . . . one of Carmen‘s most fascinating features is the way in which it does embrace light-opera format, particularly in the earlier scenes, and then transcends it in unexpected ways.”