White Horse Can't Save WNO's Staid Carmen

Carmen is a typical femme fatale: a woman who brings misfortune to the man who falls in love with her. She is also wild, untamable and somewhat mad. A contemporary stage director always faces a dilemma of how to present all of Carmen's traits to the new audiences without making her look stereotypical or ridiculous. Then there is the question of wether to stage the opera in its traditional setting or transport it to a different time and place. For the Washington National Opera's 2022 season gala, art director Francesca Zambello opted for the safer traditional route, reviving her 2006 production, first shown at the Royal Opera House in 2006. 

The problem with reviving a well-known production, which can be seen in its entirety online, is that it inevitably invites unfair comparisons. The ROH performance is almost impossible to match as was painfully obvious from the get-go in Saturday's WNO performance. 

The singer portraying the passionate gypsy has to exude sensuality while trying to avoid the exaggerated hip-swiveling or overtly sexual gestures that could put off a contemporary viewer.  Few are able to achieve that and it seems that Zambello went for one of currently best known and most popular American mezzo-sopranos, Isabel Leonard. An accomplished singer with a beautiful voice, Leonard has been an excellent interpreter of the roles that suit her, such as Nico Muhly's Marnie, reportedly written with her in mind. But it is hard to understand why anyone would want to cast the beauty known for her cool and polished demeanor in the role of a bedraggled gypsy, who washes her legs in a bucket at a town square.  Of course, a brilliant actress can pull it off, but for Leonard it seemed like too big a stretch.

Isabel Leonard in role debut as Carmen at the Kennedy Center,  photo by Scott Suchman

The acclaimed mezzo was wise to leave off the exaggerated come-hither gestures that could make her more funny than sexy. But if she had not informed Don José that she was dancing for him, no one would know she was dancing.  Her gypsy was more of a petulant child than an independent woman, holding on to her freedom. There was no dark, brooding quality to the prediction of her own imminent death. 

Lenard's voice is versatile, but does not reach deep enough into the Kennedy Center's cavernous Opera House. (This was evident a few years ago when she sang Rossini's Cinderella at the same venue). Even for a patron sitting mid-parterre it was at times hard to discern what she was singing, which makes one wonder how much could be heard in the last row.

To make matters worse, her sound did not blend well with tenor Michael Fabiano's. He sang Don José in a powerful voice that filled the house. One could further question the chemistry, or a lack thereof, between the two protagonists, but if we assume that Don José was manipulated, rather than loved, the tenor who portrays him has more freedom in approaching the role.  Some artists choose to play an ardent lover who gradually becomes embittered and finally crazed. Fabiano's José seemed to harbor a dark side to his character from the start. There was more anger than tenderness in his pivotal aria "La fleur que tu m'avais jetée."  By the closing scene he was a raving maniac, but since his interpretation lacked a development from a naive lover to the madman, it was hard to sympathize with his ultimate pain. 

Ryan Speedo Green's Escamillo lacked the electricity and sparkle surrounding a celebrity bullfighter. The real-life horse he rode onto the stage did not help. Despite Green's robust bas-baritone and adequate singing, once he got off the horse, he acted more as a priest than a heartthrob.

As José's fiancée Micaëla, Vanessa Vasquez impressed with her beautiful voice, but not with acting.

Evan Rogister led the orchestra with aplomb, including the gorgeous prelude to Act III, that starts with a lovely flute tune and expands to other woodwind. But Rogister did not exert the same control over the chorus, whose members were not always in sync.

For some pizzazz in the otherwise unexceptional production, Zambello added a cloud of smoke coming out of the cigarette factory, suggesting a fire in Carmen's workplace. In addition to the afore-mentioned horse, whose two brief entrances created significant excitement in the audience, a Spanish Easter-procession float passed by the bullfighting arena before the fatal encounter between Carmen and Don José in the last act. 

Overall, Saturday's gala performance of Carmen seemed like a successful final exam of a college drama class, in which all the students did well and got an A. But the Washington opera has to do better than that. If the company opts to go the traditional route, it must find the interpreters who will give the old production a new life, and keep in thrall even the people who have seen Carmen many, many times. If the right artists for a traditional Carmen are not available, the production should be changed to suit the ones that are. 

In 2018, ROH's premiered a new production of Carmen that was nothing short of revolutionary.  The title character stepped onto the stage out of a female gorilla suit, in short hair and androgynous clothes. She was neither sexy nor seductive. One could describe her as playful; she even winked at the audience after her staged death. The set consisted of a huge black staircase, with masked characters, dressed in black and white, dancing up and down the steps. The dialogues were replaced by voiceover narration. The minimalist production was more akin to a Broadway musical than a 19th-century opera and not to everyone's taste, but it attracted young audiences and amused the older ones, tired of seeing more of the same.

Michael Fabian and Isabel Leonard as Don José and Carmen, photo by Scott Suchman

Post-Covid Washington may be less receptive to radical innovations in a beloved operatic piece.  The audience responded warmly to the unimaginative staging and interpretations, at least during the gala evening, which created its own excitement.  

In an effort to bring people back to live performances, opera companies worldwide offer packages that are most likely to please their patrons and keep them entertained. If it takes bringing a white horse to the stage, so be it. But ultimately, only excellence and creativity will keep the genre alive. 

WNO's Carmen runs at the Kennedy Center Opera House through May 28. 

WNO Opens 60th Season

Washington National Opera opened its 60th Season on Saturday and what an eventful season it promises to be! In addition to the complete Wagner Ring, it includes a Philip Glass opera, a Kurt Weill work, Hansel and Gretel and three brand new 20-minute operas based on contemporary American stories. With so many works rarely performed in Washington coming up, it is hardly surprising that the season started with a warhorse such as Carmen.

Kennedy Center, Saturday evening, WNO season about to begin

I am happy Francesca Zambello came to Washington and took over WNO in January 2013. She had previously impressed me with her creation of the so-called American Ring, her rendition of the Wagner's tetralogy performed here between 2006 and 2009.  She reconfirmed that impression with her staging of Berlioz's Les Troyens at the Metropolitan in 2012. As WNO's artistic director, she is turning an opera house of mediocre Traviatas and Trovatores into an art organization blowing fresh air into a staid cultural atmosphere of the nation's capital. Francesca (and I feel close enough to use her first name) is my only hope that we may see a Berlioz opera in Washington one day.

Having seen several excellent performances of Carmen in the past few years, most recently a live broadcast from Orange, France, with Jonas Kaufmann and Kate Aldrich, I was prepared for a less than exciting evening. But once the lights went down and the curtain up (in this case a set splitting along a jagged line in the middle) magic happened. The more-or-less standard production directed by Loren Meeker had a few novelties to offer, such as a couple of enter-acte flamenco dancers. Since Clémentine Margaine's Carmen was not an especially skilled dancer, it would have been good to see a little more of Fanny Ara doing it for her.

Flamenco dancers Fanny Ara and Timo Nuñez 

Margaine has a beautiful voice, but her entrance was not impressive and it took a while for her to assert her presence. In the first act one could hardly distinguish her from other factory girls and her rendition of Habanera did nothing to make her stand out. Maybe a more strategic wardrobe and makeup would help. Her singing improved in the subsequent acts, but the wardrobe did not.

One problem most Carmens have is how to be seductive without being ridiculous. This one did nothing different than most others before her (Baltimore Opera's Milena Kitić from a decade ago comes to mind) and her trump card was spreading her legs around a guy. Directors should make a little more effort than have the "Gypsy" girl strut back and forth on the stage, wiggling her hips and hawking her wares like a vulgar street girl. That's not sexy. Furthermore, coming from the Balkans, I have seen more Gypsies than an average American opera patron, and none of their women walk like the operatic Carmen. Kate Aldrich changed the routine somewhat in the contemporary Orange production, but in my view, nobody has done a better job of seduction than Elina Garanča for the Met's Carmen a few years ago. She seemed to have a lot of fun with it and everything she did looked natural. A singer who is not good with gestures can be made more seductive with the right clothes and a suitable wig.

Bryan Hymel was an impressive Énée in Les Troyens recently and thus an artist to look forward to in WNO's Carmen. He was a sensitive and convincing Don José, though sharing more chemistry with Janai Brugger's excellent Micaëla than with Margaine's Carmen.

Bryan Hymel and Janai Brugger as Don José and Micaëla in WNO' Carmen

Michael Todd Simpson was a lackluster Escamillo. His entrance failed to electrify the stage as a celebrity toreador's is expected to do, although there was some improvement in the last act. Kenneth Kellog was well suited for the role of Lieutenant Zuniga and Nicholas Houhoulis did well as tavern owner Lillas Pastia. The sets were a slightly stylized take on the standard for the opera, with the faded image of la Nuestra Señora de Guadelupe hinting that the smuggling might be taking place on the U.S. border with Mexico rather than anywhere near Seville.

Overall, it was a solid performance that should please anyone who has not seen Bizet's masterpiece in a while. It was also an appropriate prelude to the new and rarely seen works such as Appomatox and others that will follow. The 2007 opera by Philip Glass will be WNO's first ever performance of a work by arguably the most celebrated contemporary American composer. The reworked version includes a completely new second act, featuring Washington native Soloman Howard as Martin Luther King Jr.

An important company premiere will be a South African production of Kurt Weill's Lost in the Stars based on Alan Paton's novel Cry, the Beloved Country. Bass-baritone Eric Owens interprets Stephen Kumalo, a minister in apartheid-era South Africa who travels from his small village to Johannesburg to find his errant son.

The highlight of the WNO's 60th anniversary without doubt is Wagner's Ring. The cycle of the four operas attracts the world's attention whenever it is staged and people will travel distances to see the Met Ring, the Seattle Ring, the Melbourne Ring, and others, with the Bayreuth Ring remaining a lifelong dream for many an opera lover. WNO performed the four operas separately over four seasons about a decade ago, with the last one, Götterdämmerung given in concert form as the production money ran out. Oh, but what a glorious concert it was - with South African Gidon Kramer brooding his way into the role of Hagen to create the sexiest version of the evil dwarf's offspring ever seen on the stage. The then-WNO director Placido Domingo did a commendable job as Siegmund in the 2007 Walküre. All in all, it was a memorable Ring, the staggered performances whetting the appetite for every subsequent installment - and now making one eager to see how the next year's complete cycle will compare to the first run.

Santa Fe Opera

The Santa Fe Opera 2014 season includes the U.S. premiere of a Chinese-language work and the company's first staging of Beethoven's only opera.   The mixed results show that updating an older staging does not always work, and that sticking to the classical form in a new work sometimes does.

The long-standing motto in theater production has been "when in doubt, go Nazi." I've seen Ian McKellen as a crippled version of Hitler in Shakespeare's Richard III, I've seen Ionesco's Rhinocéros dressed in shiny black Nazi raincoats, I've seen a number of Wagner's operas with staging nodding to Nazi Germany, and countless of other "nazified" classics that I only vaguely remember.  So the Santa Fe Opera's offering of Beethoven's Fidelio with a Nazi twist was nothing new, but it was puzzling.   With names like Leonore, Rocco, Fernando, Jaquino and Pizarro, perhaps Franco's Spain would have been a more logical choice.

Alex Penda as Leonore/Fidelio

One could tolerate the unimaginative production if the singing or acting were first-class. Neither was the case in Stephen Wadsworth's drab offering.  The dungeon scene was so dark that you could not see anyone's face even through a good pair of binoculars.  Paul Groves, who once delighted me as Nemorino, was hardly suited for the role of Florestan. He seemed more angry than hungry or exhausted as he would be after two years of harsh imprisonment.  Petite Hungarian soprano Alex Penda was a passionate Leonore, just not an electrifying one.  The chorus was the star of the program although the group was too small to be representing inmates of a Nazi concentration camp as their clothing suggested.  The Mariinsky made the number of soldiers in Prokofiev's War and Peace appear huge by making the extras circle around the stage and throw their shades onto the backdrop. Wadsworth did not have any novel idea in that respect.  The program says it's the Santa Fe Opera's first ever staging of Fidelio.  One wonders why bother for such a mediocre result. On a miserably cold and rainy August night there was simply no reason to sit through the whole performance when a good book and a warm blanket beckoned back in the hotel room.

Since I did not go to Santa Fe to see Fidelio, the disappointment was not huge, but rather expected.  The real reason for my first foray into an opera house away from the East Coast was the U.S. premiere of Huang Ruo's Dr. Sun Yat-Sen.  It was my first Chinese language opera, but not first by Huang, whose one-hour-long An American Soldier premiered recently at the Washington National Opera.  As described by most reviewers, the music for Dr. Sun Yat-Sen is a successful blend of Chinese and classic western idiom.  Standard opera lovers who shy away from the often jarring sounds of modern music need not fear: Huang's music is gorgeous and the theatrical structure is mostly classical.  There are beautiful arias, duets, quartets and choral parts, there is drama, there is romance. Huang must have a thing about motherhood because two most beautiful solo arias he has written are the mother's aria in the closing scene of An American Soldier and Soong Ching-ling's aria about a baby lost by miscarriage in Dr. Sun Yat-Sen.  Chinese language (or languages) did not sound as strange as a westerner might expect.  In terms of sound, this opera did not feel any more foreign than, for example, a Russian opera.  War and Peace kept coming to mind.

The singers were good throughout, and some were excellent, especially Corinne Winters as Sun Yat-Sen's young wife Ching-ling and Dong-Jian Gong as her father Charlie Soong. The one weak point in my opinion was the title character.  As Huang said, his opera portrays the Chinese revolutionary icon as a private person with all his qualities and failures.  Huang said he wanted to show the human side of the revered historic personality, and there is nothing wrong with that.  But in my opinion, the composer did a better job with Soong whose leadership qualities as well as his human weaknesses were clearly delineated and well portrayed by the interpreter who made his character memorable and appealing.  Tenor Joseph Dennis looked and sounded more like a turn-of-the century British gentleman, than father of the Chinese revolution.  Without a synopsis, I probably would have mistaken the Charlie Soong character for Sun Yat-Sen. 

Reporter at Santa Fe Opera

Despite weaknesses, which I believe could be fixed (as they were in the cases of many world famous operas) Huang's opus is an exceptional work, that should enter standard opera repertory.   I hope Santa Fe will serve as a starting point in that direction.  A soprano desiring to record an interesting new album would do well to include the Ching-ling "lost baby" aria and/or find a tenor with whom to sing the lovely wedding duet. 

Unfortunately, the clips from the opera offered on YouTube do not include Corinne Winters' poignant solo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4j3ydqeYINI

Santa Fe's Carmen was a pleasant surprise.  I got a ticket as an afterthought, and expected to leave early as I did from Fidelio, but the production was innovative in an attractive way.  The plain boxy sets were moved around and lit differently to change the setting from a cigarette factory to jail, then to a smugglers' hangout, a border crossing and finally a plaza outside a bullfight arena.  They also served as a screen for black-and-white video projections which showed events between the staged scenes, for example Micaëla's tending to Don Jose's sick mother, and Don Jose's grim attendance at the mother's funeral.  The latter actually helped understand his desperation during the final confrontation with Carmen.  A few production details that raised questions were prison bars on the tobacco factory and factory girls working in their underwear.  The girls' exit from the factory seemed like a release of prostitutes from jail after an overnight police raid.  Carmen's arrival to the bullfight in a blond Marilyn Monroe-style wig was also puzzling until Don Jose tore it off her head.  But was it necessary? 

The choice of soprano Ana Maria Martinez for the title role was an unusual one and in my opinion not the most fortunate.   She lacked the dark and brooding quality of the tragic gypsy girl.  But she looked the part of a modern drug smuggler she portrayed in this production, and held her own vocally.  Tenor Roberto de Biasio was not your favorite Don Jose.

The highlight of the season in my view (although I did not see Don Pasquale) was Stravinsky.   His short and rarely performed opera Le rossignol was preceded by Mozart's The Impresario and cleverly presented as a play within a play.  Bickering singers and their agents from The Impressario were "hired" to perform in Stravinsky's piece.  But while The Impresario was only somewhat amusing, Le rossignol was a jewel of scenic design, lighting, costumes, singing and acting.   A music critic might have found details to complain about, but I was too mesmerized by the production as a whole to be distracted by minutiae.  As far as I am concerned, that one hour of opera was worth a trip to Santa Fe all by itself.

Santa Fe Opera Auditorium

Finally, a word or two about the Santa Fe Opera business.  The building is attractive and offers a good view of the stage from every seat in the house, including the $40 spots all the way back and on the sides.  The income lost on cheaper seats is well recompensed by items of clothing and comfort sold in the gift shop at exorbitant prices.  Simple nylon jackets are sold for $65 a piece, or $95 if lined.  A cheap-looking thin hoodie you can get for a little over $10 at the Old Navy costs $40 to $50 at the opera shop.  The cheapest essential item, a bright red polyester lap throw, is $25.   And I say essential because the uninitiated may come to Santa Fe unprepared like I did.  When the night falls in Santa Fe and temperatures drop by some 20 degrees, usually just before the intermission, the chilled patrons rush into the store and buy whatever they can get their hands on just to be able to sit through the rest of the performance without shivering.  If it rains during the intermission as it often did while I was there, the shop and the restrooms are the only available shelter for a crowd of more than 2,000 patrons unless, of course, you want to remain in your seat.

On a clear day, the views from this beacon on the hill are spectacular - all rolling hills dotted with sage brush, pine trees and junipers.  But I found the open-air picnic tables mostly deserted in early August.  Who can sit through a meal with cold winds blowing from all sides and the threat of an imminent thunderstorm above your head?  The picnic-minded people brought their own little folding tables and chairs and set them up next to their cars in the parking lot, where they sat sheltered from the wind.  They enjoyed their wines and their salads with a view of other cars and in the air permeated with fragrance from the exhaust systems. But, hey, aren't we more used to the smell of gas than the pleasures of mother nature?  I certainly would have preferred to sit in my car all evening than returned to Washington as I did, covered in humongous mosquito bites  (or was it something else ?) . The Santa Fe bugs are a sneaky and treacherous lot.   I never heard a buzz of warning.  The repellent does not bother them either, so save your money there.