Carmen 

Une Petite Carmen based on the Bizet adapted by Emily Leather and Benjamin Smith
produced by The Bay View Music Festival Summer 2008

Conductor: Emily Leather
Set Design: Todd Hulet
Light Design: Samantha Bostwick
Costume Design: David Hermosillo

From the Program:

 I feel incredibly fortunate to stage this fantastic adaptation of Carmen here in Bay View this summer.  What Benjamin Smith and Emily Leather have accomplished is a remarkable distillation of the opera down to its essence, returning it to the roots of the source material, Prosper Mérimée’s dark novella.

 Without the ever-present Carmen chorus, the opera takes on a very different feeling, not one of bustling city streets, but of lonely urban streets.  The absence of town citizens marks the danger of the place.  The characters are not performing for the public sphere, but instead are revealing their truth in intimate quarters.  It is because of these qualities that I chose to explore this opera using the film noir genre.

 Carmen is, arguably the prototype for the film noir femme fatale, just as Don Jose is for the anti-hero, and Micaela for the good woman.  It is a classic noir story of a man loosing himself over a woman that he knows is bad for him, retold so many times in movies such as Double Indemnity and Gilda. 

 So we bring you our Carmen: in the mean streets of our Seville, the back room of the bar where the smugglers make their deals, the rooftop of a condemned building, and the changing room of a bullfighter. We hope you enjoy this re-envisioning of the classic tragedy.

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