It’s edifying to compare these technical choices with those heard in the 1954 movie. The Carmen and Cindy Lou of the film are Dorothy Dandridge and Olga James. Dandridge is  dubbed by the very young Marilyn Horne; James does her own singing. They are performing on mike here, too, but without the habits and expectations of recent music theatre practice. Horne has spoken of the hours she and Dandridge put in to secure a match in timbre, accent, and inflection, and I must say they succeeded brilliantly. Horne sounds just like what we project as Dandridge’s “legit” singing voice, and Dandridge looks as if she’s making the very sounds Horne is producing. And of course Horne’s voice, sometimes with the aid of an embryonic version of what she later called her “squeezed” midrange, has the strength to meet the dramatic demands, as well as a smoky chest blend for the Habañera. This Card Song, even if exactly wrong in terms of the opera (not an acceptance of the inexorable progression of Fate, but a vehement protest against it) is a high point of the film.

James sounds here like a Figaro Barbarina or a Tannhäuser Shepherd in need of stronger support before taking on bigger roles. In the aria, quite changed in intent, ^(I)she takes lower options in the propulsive B section. This sounds like a concession to a light soprano structure that would buckle under the pressure of a real attack, but whether it was done specifically for James, or for one of the original Cindy Lou alternates and thus written in, I won’t know till I can hear that cast album. In any case, James then floats a lovely B-flat at the close—an interpolation taken by Micaëlas of old, but of late proscribed. Here there’s no miracle of sound/sight match, since James, pretty much a pleasant blank as an actress, is oddly unable to suggest the act of singing to her own recorded voice, and her aria, hacked into two separated sections, is consigned to interior monologue as she wanders the streets of Chicago.

And the men? As I said, their passaggio problem, though vexing to many a tenor and baritone, is not so glaring, at least to lay ears, because the retention of chest-register bracing for the upper notes makes the “break” less pronounced, even in a technically imperfect voice. (Exception: the male falsettists we call “countertenors”—but that’s a whole other article, at least.) In the film, the singing voice for Joe (Harry Belafonte, at the time of his early calypso fame) is that of LeVern Hutcherson. I saw Hutcherson once. He was the alternate to William Warfield as Porgy in the 1952-53 revival that played the old Ziegfeld Theatre. Porgy? So he was a baritone, or even bass-baritone? He was, and as I recall a good one, with a handsome, sizable voice. How, then, is he singing the music of Joe, again in the keys Bizet set for José? (Caveat: I’m again relying on my ear, and the rental’s expired. But I don’t have much doubt on this.) Answer: really impressively, and though it’s done mostly by means that would not win acceptance in the full operatic context, it has surprising moments that suggest an almost Heldentenor-ish capacity.