Bizet's "Carmen" is so familiar that one tends to take it for granted. But any performance -- even a mediocre one -- makes it impossible to take for granted so daring, so dramatically imaginative and so psychologically penetrating a piece of musical theater. And when a performance is as provocative, intelligently staged, cast, designed and performed as the Washington Opera's new production, which opened Saturday night at the Kennedy Center, "Carmen" is overwhelming.
The concept behind director Ann-Margret Pettersson's staging of "Carmen" is simple, powerful and true to Bizet's music and his libretto. Carmen represents the "other" as female: She is sensual; she exists beyond the pull of conventional morality; and she lives only for pleasure. But -- and this is what puts her among the great dramatic creations -- she demands for herself the freedom in sexual matters that men take for granted. It is this that makes Carmen a femme fatale -- fatal not only to men, but also to herself.
Pettersson brilliantly stages her entrance. On a stage dominated by the hot yellow colors of the tobacco factory, Carmen appears in a manner that tells us immediately why she threatens the natural (i.e. male-created and -dominated) order.
The other "girls" enter from the doors on the upper stage. But when "Where is Carmacita," is asked, huge doors below fly open with a crash. Hellgate -- metaphorically speaking -- has burst to reveal Denyce Graves' Carmen standing in a provocatively clinging black dress.
That entrance from below identifies Carmen with the heat of the nether regions. And there's one other detail that identifies Carmen as particularly dangerous. Unlike the other "girls," who make their entrances with lighted cigarettes, Carmen makes hers with a long, thick cigar between her lips.
When she immediately launches into Bizet's famous "Habanera," therefore, we listen more carefully than usual when Carmen tells us that she cannot be restrained when she feels the urge to make love. We have heard such operatic credos before -- from the lascivious Duke in Verdi's "Rigoletto" or from the famously libertine Don Giovanni in Mozart's opera of that name. The difference is that Carmen is a woman. What the cigar suggests, the "Habanera" tells us: where conventional morality is concerned, Carmen is a woman with a penis.
