Pathology of a bad production
mainLarry Johnson takes a scalpel to Chicago’s new Carmen, directed by a Broadway song-and-dance man:
You knew it was going to be a long night at the Civic Opera House when the undulating shirtless male dancer with a bull’s head mask appeared during the opening Prelude to menace a group of fellow dancers dressed as toreadors.
That pretty much set the sophomoric tone for Lyric Opera’s hapless new production of Bizet’s Carmen, which opened Saturday night.
Read on here.
photo: Todd Rosenberg
It is good to see there are still critics with honesty and integrity and call things as they see them. There are multiple commenters who thanked Mr. Johnson for writing this.
With 799 homicides and 3633 shot and wounded in Chicago in 2016*, it’s surprising that there is anyone left to form an opera audience.
*source: heyjackass.com
Technically that still leaves >2.7 million in Chicago (and >9.5 million in the metropolitan area) who aren’t dead, wounded or imprisoned to form an opera audience.
This seems to have been really bad. But I prefer the smoke-free Carmen:
http://www.denisdutton.com/smoke.htm
I’ve never seen a production so unequivocally called out like that before. It almost seemed personal.