In review: from around the world: Seattle.(North America)(Carmen)(Opera Review)

James Robinson's imaginative direction of Seattle Opera's new Carmen (seen January 24) transformed the well-worn Shakespearean metaphor of the world-as-stage into the stuff of deeply moving tragedy. Act I appeared to be taking place in a square in Seville, but the crudely painted flats, which shook and shivered when actors brushed by, immediately suggested a low-budget production in a small provincial opera house. At the act's end, however, the Seville scenery ascended into the flies, revealing a bare stage and shattered auditorium beyond. What began out front as play-acting--a bunch of actors or opera singers pretending to be characters--turned into a real-life, backstage story in which the doomed lovers fulfilled their destinies, disturbing the audience's preconceptions of what is real and what is illusion.

Under Robinson's guiding hand, the spoken dialogue added to the opera's dramatic power, making Don Jose a stronger, more coherent character than usual. Too many past productions have left me wondering why Carmen would waste her time on a simp; in Robinson's Seattle Opera Carmen, Jose was a dangerous opponent, increasing in menace as he became more sexually obsessed. Though his voice showed some signs of strain when emotional tensions tightened, Paul Charles Clarke's Jose was a truly tragic figure. (He also deserves commendation for singing the B-flat at the end of the flower song pianissimo, as marked.) In Stephanie Blythe's performance, Carmen herself was less a tragic figure than an ...