Joe and Carmen Jones, however, are not outsiders. There’s no hint of a past for Joe that gives the actor something to work with, no counterculture minority identity for Carmen. So when Joe sings what’s left of his duet with Cindy Lou (Micaëla), there’s no longing for the village he’s been forced to leave, no deeper layer to Cindy Lou’s evocation of his mother than the things she does and says that are “just like my maw” (shall I say mawkish?—sorry). There’s no class structure, only military rank; no ethnic discriminations of up or down, in or out. Military, civilian, working the mess hall (in the film—at CSC, I couldn’t tell where we were) or camp-following Husky Miller (Escamillo)—everything’s flattened out, and with the social pressures lowered from a continuous active boil to a simmer, there’s nothing to produce a tragedy except individual screw-ups.

All this we must debit to Oscar Hammerstein II, for all his earnest intentions. And while as lyricist he assuredly ranks in the top half-dozen who have ever written for the American musical stage, here he ran into trouble in even this capacity, on two grounds. First, he needed to come up with a vernacular that would gesture toward common American black usage yet  not seem to condescend or stereotype. The upshot is a few dozen “Dis’s,” “Dat’s,” and “De’s” scattered like buckshot through perfectly well-formed everyday American (especially in the sung portions), and since this amounts to a dialect I’ve never heard spoken by anyone white or black, it seems like another artifact of an unsettled level of reality. Second, he had to try to tack this vernacular onto the supple, wide-ranging, French romantic vocal contours of Bizet, which are often fragmented, but left in key. His successes are mostly with the lighter numbers (the Habañera has seductive wit and a hint of threat; it earned some laughs at CSC), or when the music moves at a steady pace on a horizontal plane, which is seldom, but fortunately inclusive of the Card Song. For long stretches, the heightened and the colloquial keep tripping each other up, and the odd mix of polite with blue-collar sounds clogs the line, or, as C. J. would put it, “De line!”

So Doyle and his troupe bit off quite a chunk. There’s no denying the ingenuity with which he takes sacred monsters and turns them into domesticated pets—like it or not, it’s a feat of sorts. In this case, he gave himself even less than the usual CSC playing area. He put audience on all four sides of the roughly square, high-ceilinged room, with his instrumental combo in a niche at mezzanine level—a conformation I don’t recall having seen before in this hallowed little space. So his staging had to stay within squared-off, in-the-round confines that at moments did seem intimate, at others merely cramped, and with the actors’ backs to us a fair share of the time, wherever we sat. I’ve never understood why anyone thinks this is a good idea, and it led to odd presentational moments, with the cast lined up for direct-address statements to one favored side, then another, etc. From our side, I couldn’t see what happened at the end—I guess he killed her.