It has come to pass that a production of Carmen is being canceled because it may promote smoking. Really. See the evidence:
The West Australia Opera's planned production of Bizet's Carmen has been canceled over fears it would jeopardize a $400,000 partnership with a government health agency.Carmen is famously set around a cigarette factory, and features smoking. Healthway, the state government's health promotion agency, which is a WAO partner, does not allow even electronic cigarettes to be smoked at any event which it sponsors.
Carolyn Chard, WAO general manager said: “We care about the health and wellbeing of our staff, stage performers and all the opera lovers throughout WA, which means promoting health messages and not portraying any activities that could be seen to promote unhealthy behaviour.”
Healthway chairwoman Dr. Rosanna Capolingua said: "The portrayal of smoking on stage, in film and on TV normalises smoking and presents it as being attractive, which could dissuade smokers from quitting and encourage young people to take it up... In addition, new trends such as smoking electronic cigarettes may re-establish smoking behaviour in our community where the majority of people are non-smokers."
I yield to no one in personal and passionate hatred of smoking, and see good reasons for banning advertising, indoor smoking, everything else, even if it bothers some libertarian sentiments, but for heaven's sake don't prohibit Bizet. If Carmen is banned for promoting smoking, what should be done with operas "promoting" seduction, betrayal, incest, murder, and so on?
There is an interesting legal/contrarian opinion from La Cieca, a.k.a. James Jorden:
The opera company freely entered into an agreement with a sponsor, a government-funded health organization. Part of that agreement — stated up front — is that an arts group accepting funding from this organization will not present any depiction of smoking.The sponsorship agreement is finite; that is, the parties enter into it for a certain number of years. The management of the opera company decided not to present Carmen during the term of that agreement (apparently only two or three years) because, in the opinion of the opera management, there would be some scenes in the opera that would be technically in violation of that agreement.
According to the press on this so far, no one at the health organization objected to Carmen specifically, and no planned performances were “scrapped.” The opera company simply chose not to program Carmen, one opera out of many in the standard repertoire, for a period of a couple of years until their sponsorship with the health organization has run its course.
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The problem here is with private sponsorship: it always has some kinds of strings attached.
UPDATE: It's the clashing principles that make the story interesting, but the specific case has been resolved by a surprising government intervention, the Health Minister (a doctor) ordering the company to produce the opera "as is":
West Australian Health Minister Kim Hames has told WA Opera the show must go on and it can resume its staging of/Carmen, /complete with tobacco references, without endangering a Healthway sponsorship.
Dr. Hames said on Monday he would write to WA Opera to tell the company it could go ahead with a performance of/Carmen/if it wanted and that he would direct Healthway not to intervene in schedule decisions.