Sexual fixation is par for the course in the operatic universe. Prince Calàf (Puccini’s Turandot), Werther (Massenet’s Werther), 1,003 women in Spain alone (Mozart’s Don Giovanni), and over three centuries worth of suitors (Janáček’s The Makropulos Case) are some of the operatic characters who would have had a much easier time of it had they sought out a 12-step group for sex and love addiction.
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One of the most fixated of opera’s big boys, Bizet’s Don José, might have lived far longer if he hadn’t met a smoking gun named Carmen. Courting danger like a pimp for Big Oil, he violated his duties as a soldier and turned his back on his family in order to throw himself at the feet of a woman who scorned him. In just a few acts, it was bye-bye Don José, and Carmen too.
Always trying to push the envelope, Berkeley West Edge Opera General Director Mark Streshinsky felt that traditional productions of Carmen neglected the inner workings of the compulsive characters who populate the story. Inspired in part by Peter Brook’s treatment of the opera, which strips things down and moves elements around, Streshinsky and Musical Director Jonathan Khuner decided to concentrate more on who the characters are and the nature of their personal relationships with each other.
“We wanted to explore the compulsions that drive them to ruin each other’s and their own lives,” Khuner explained by cell between cues as assistant conductor of Chicago Lyric Opera’s production of Lohengrin. “It’s not bullfights and happy smugglers and children’s choruses that do Don José and Carmen in; it’s their fantasies of each other and their desires for each other. It’s their belief systems, and what they want in their own free lives. They are trying to get something from and for each other, but they are standing in their own and each other’s way.”
Streshinsky, who had staged the Peter Brook production at Yale and thought it didn’t work well onstage, decided that he would not assault the opera’s musical integrity. Rather than recompose, as Brooks did, he and Khuner decided to massage parts of the libretto while leaving much of Bizet’s music intact (if not in the usual order).
“We sought to twist things into a different shape,” says Khuner. “We tell the same story with the same people, but we change the setting somewhat. We’ve made a new overture out of music from other places in Carmen to allow enough time to tell the back story [that winds its way to where Bizet’s opera begins]. We lead into the first act in a new way, and set the scene differently. We have the underworld, the criminal elements, and the exotic temptress, for example, but we don’t have gypsies.”
At each point in the opera, the two men try to tell the story from the characters’ points of view. Some music is changed around or eliminated, and dialogue is reconstructed. Different elements are juxtaposed to highlight the tensions between the obsessed, fixated characters that populate Carmen’s world.
You’ll find out what happens if you join the populace, and head to El Cerrito Performing Arts Theater. There are only four performances between March 5 and March 13.