In a nod to Spain’s bullfighting tradition, a naked toreador - the lone figure on a dimly lit stage - pays homage to the creature in slow choreography set to Bizet’s lovely entr’acte. Act II is dominated by the image of a giant bull. The soldiers are brutes in Act I, they bind and hoist a half-naked woman up a flagpole. There’s a frankness to the sexuality in both camps.

Fists, whips and rifles are part of the landscape.

The Gypsies are a hard-partying gang whose preferred mode of transportation is in scarred Mercedes sedans. (Joan Anton Rechi directs this revival, which marks the American premiere of both Bieito and his production.)Ĭarmen makes her first entrance from a phone booth, mobbed by soldiers as she muscles forward to sing her Habanera. This is not your grandmother’s “Carmen.”Īctions speak louder than words in Bieito’s staging, which originated in Europe in 1999 and has been revived numerous times since. The Catalan director sets the action in what looks like a remote outpost in post-Franco Spain, dispensing with the opera’s folkloric elements, cutting much of its original dialogue, reducing it from five acts to two (with one intermission), and creating indelible pictures of a dark frontier society beset by hardship, cruelty and sexual violence. There’s little sun, less romance and no happy, hip-swinging Gypsies in Calixto Bieito’s rough-edged and often startlingly insightful staging of Bizet’s 1875 masterpiece.īieito’s version, which opened the company’s summer season Friday evening at the War Memorial Opera House, takes a starker approach.

SAN FRANCISCO - The new “Carmen” at San Francisco Opera isn’t the usual night out in old Seville.

San francisco opera 2016