Perspective shift
There’s no opera more freighted with audience expectations, performance stereotypes, and 19th-century cultural encrustations than Carmen. It’s virtually a ritual experience involving archetypes rather than characters — The Tempestuous Gypsy (Carmen), The Haughty Toreador (Escamillo), The Jealous Soldier (Don José), and The Naïve Lass (Micaëla) — all viewed from a male perspective.
That’s not what you’re going to get at the Santa Fe Opera this summer, thanks to a much more specific and much more timely approach from its female director/designer team and the singers portraying Carmen and Micaëla. Their viewpoint is that Bizet’s opera is just as much a story of today, about a man with a violent past committing an act of femicide, as it is a period piece romanticizing its setting, characters, and themes.
Stage director Mariame Clément says that the aspects of the opera they’re focusing on are all present in the music and the original text, it just requires a closer reading of the libretto — especially the extensive dialogue — than it usually receives. That, and a point of view that’s not a standard male-oriented interpretation, with José as the victim of a manipulative and unfaithful femme fatale.
“As 20th-century women, we were socialized to learn and feel that Carmen was the ultimate love story,” she says. “I can remember getting a mailing from the Royal Opera House saying that taking your sweetheart to Carmen was the perfect Valentine’s Day gift!
“We want to lose the default perspective on Carmen, which is really Don José’s viewpoint. It’s not a neutral point of view. Our goal is to shift it back to Carmen’s point of view and make her a three-dimensional character. She needs to be a real person whom we like and come to understand better, not a man’s fantasy idea of the wild, sexy woman.”
One very important aspect of the director’s approach is the difference in the way her feelings for Escamillo are portrayed, compared to those for José.
“Carmen and Escamillo have this little duet in Act III, and it’s very moving, very intense, with a true duet feeling that we don’t find anywhere else in the piece,” Clément says. “Maybe he’s not just the next lover in a series, but the real one. I want to believe her when she says, ‘I’ve never loved someone like I love you,’ which is what she says.”
Another major difference comes in the interpretation of Micaëla, who usually seems a shy, prim young woman who has just arrived from prep school. Here, the fact that she’s from a rural area and isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty are the keys to her character.
Clément’s approach was developed jointly with scenic and costume designer Julia Hansen, a frequent collaborator since their first project, in 2004, a double bill of Rossini’s Signor Bruschino and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. “I think this is the deepest work on the text Mariame has ever done,” Hansen says. “Everything in the design came out of the text, so I hope we can make that clear.”
Clément points out that their scenery will have all the locales audiences expect, such as the factory exterior in Act I and the tavern in Act II, but they’re presented within the context of a larger metaphorical framework — an abandoned amusement park with a 1950s or 1960s feeling.
“It’s a metaphor for Carmen’s mental landscape,” she says, “The amusement park is about the illusion of freedom; it has ups and downs and adventures, but it’s all artificial and controlled and fake. Carmen isn’t really free, despite what she sings, because she’s free only to die at the end, so what kind of freedom is that?”
How does their process begin? “We start together with brainstorming about the characters,” Hansen says, and it’s the character discussions that fuel her costume designs. “I don’t do a concept around something; it’s the idea of finding different characters in what they wear.”
For the Carmen principals, Hansen brought several different options to the first fitting, to see which ones resonate most with the performers. “Some singers
like to have costumes as a kind of protection, a kind of armor,” she says. “I didn’t create ‘postcard costumes’ for Carmen because we want her to wear clothes people can relate to.
“We are very fortunate with Isabel Leonard as our Carmen. She tried on the first choice we had for her and looked in the mirror and says, ‘Oh, my God, this is so me!’ which was great. ‘I want to go into this piece with all my soul.’ It’s a big thing for a singer to say this, to take the risk and play a real flesh-and-blood woman we can relate to.”
“Especially with Carmen, for me, it’s about getting to the essence of the character,” Leonard says, “and not putting on a front too soon, not falling into some of the physicality that you’ve seen before.” Her character’s concept of freedom is a particular point for the mezzo-soprano. “It’s not an anarchistic viewpoint, where she wants to do something to the detriment of others.
“She’s simply saying, ‘Get off my neck! Don’t tread on me!’ We all have a little bit of that. All artists have some of that. So often we’re doing what we’re told; it’s not until you’ve been in a career for a while that you can express your opinions, and they might actually be listened to.”
Leonard came to Santa Fe directly from her first Carmen with Washington National Opera in May. Performing in back-to-back productions of the same piece would be unusual in the theater world, but not so much in opera. It’s happened to Leonard before, such as consecutive Rosinas in The Barber of Seville in Chicago and Dallas. “It’s inevitable that you bring a lot of the previous production with you to rehearsals of the new one,” she says, “partly because it’s a very human thing to do what is familiar. But when you have a great director, like we do here, you keep on evolving the character.”
Leonard also feels a sense of ancestry in her portrayal. “My mother was born in Argentina, and her mother and generations back were from southern Spain. Every production is different, of course, but as far as who she is historically or mythologically, there is that sense of responsibility to the ghosts of your family’s past.”
In addition to Carmen, Micaëla receives a stem-tostern makeover as well, which is just fine by soprano Sylvia D’Eramo. “I love her! But I don’t like the naïve, almost dumb portrayal she often gets shoved into,” she says. “In this production she’s still young, but she’s more worldly. She wants Don José; she’s out there to get him. She wants to show him she’s not a little girl anymore, that she’s a badass who can go and get what and who she wants. She’s brave, earnest, and selfless.”
Her characterization also takes a big cue from Micaëla’s rural upbringing, with the soprano describing her as “rough and tumble, out there in the dirt and doing what needs to get done.” D’Eramo grew up in Tyler, Texas, home of Kilgore College and its Rangerettes, the drill team known for the slogan “beauty knows no pain.” She didn’t daydream about becoming a Rangerette, however. D’Eramo’s favorite childhood activities were making mud puddles in the backyard and digging in the dirt alongside her yellow lab Becca, the perfect background for this earthier interpretation of Micaëla.
Leonard’s first SFO appearance was as Cherubino in 2008’s The Marriage of Figaro; she returned in 2011 for Costanza in Vivaldi’s Griselda and in 2015 as Ada in the world premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain. D’Eramo was a Santa Fe apprentice in 2018 and 2019, performing small roles in Jenuº fa and Madame Butterfly, as well as understudying Mimi in La Bohème.
They’re joined in the cast by tenors Matthew White (in July) and Michael Fabiano (in August) as Don José. Fabiano was an apprentice here in 2005 and sang Alfredo in the 2013 La Traviata; White is making his SFO debut as a late replacement for Bryan Hymel who dropped out of the production in early June. Baritone Michael Sumuel is also making his Santa Fe Opera debut as Escamillo