• Carmen Jones

7/20/18 (Fri), New York Off Broadway

Oscar Hammerstein II completed this English-language version of Carmen, reset in a black community in wartime America, just before turning to the starkly different world of Carousel, which I saw on Broadway a few days earlier. Carmen feels almost like a musical in the first place (Carousel, for that matter, sometimes feels like opera), so it makes much more sense as a Broadway show than, say, the La Boheme staging some years back. Still, the vocal requirements for this show must be a killer for an eight-performance week, and other issues, not least some less-than-PC black dialect, make productions pretty rare – the last time I saw it was in London several decades ago. So I wasn’t going to miss this.

The famously minimalist John Doyle has squeezed this version into a tiny 200-seat space, performed in the round with a cast of ten playing all the roles. That allows for glorious un-miked sound, a luxury for a musical these days. It has also been pared down to an audience-friendly 95 minutes. Actors enter and exit from all four sides of the stage in a kinetic production. With virtually no sets or props – the scenery was mainly a constant reconfiguring of boxes – the focus is firmly on the characters and story.

That approach paid off big time by a top-rate cast in what is by far the best acted version of the piece I’ve ever seen (though comparing to Zeffirelli-scale opera productions may not be appropriate). The actors were invested in the piece with an awesome intensity, giving an unusually naturalistic performance for this material. My guess – there was no printed Playbill – is that these are Broadway actors with opera training rather than the other way around given the level of acting and especially the crisp enunciation, which made it possible to hear every word of Hammerstein’s adroit adaptation.

Anika Noni Rose was beautiful and poised and every inch a Carmen, including a powerhouse voice that wrung every bit of emotion from her songs. A star in every way (and a knockout in that tight red dress). But even she met her match in a terrific Clifton Duncan as Joe in the performance of the night, conveying the character’s anguish with great feeling. Tramell Tillman (sergeant), David Aron Damane (boxer), Lindsay Roberts (Joe’s girlfriend) – not a dud in the cast, nearly all playing multiple roles. The strong supporting players, especially the women, helped lift this beyond opera to an amazing piece of good theater.

Accusations of dated black accents (d’at, I is, etc) are warranted, but that reduces this show, which creates fully realized characters of great feeling and dignity, to a few words. Hammerstein must have heard all this before with Showboat. Fortunately Doyle presented the show warts and all, with no evident embarrassment or ironic reinterpretation by the cast. A shout-out as well to the excellent lighting and period costumes. A great, great show. If this doesn’t extend to an open-ended run, there’s no justice in theater.