supercheesegirl

On Sunday Mom and I went to our first opera of the 2011-2012 season. Carmen was a lot of fun. She's a fiery gypsy, and all the men in town are in love with her. After she wounds a chick in a knife fight, she seduces the army corporal who was ordered to take her to prison; he falls in love with her and sets her free, losing his rank in the army and going to prison himself in her stead. Upon his release, he seeks Carmen out and ends up going with her and a bunch of other gypsies on a smuggling mission. Alas, the smugglers' hidden camp in the mountain wilderness is apparently really easy to find: the soldier's hometown sweetheart, who still loves him, seeks him out to tell him his mother is dying, and the bullfighter whom Carmen can't stop thinking about also arrives, complete in bullfighter costume (for a hike in the mountains?), singing cheerfully about how happy he is to be a toreador (seriously, his song echoes over the hillside as he leaves, causing the entire audience to giggle). The soldier leaves with the nice girl, but swears to Carmen that he'll be back and they'll be together. The last scene happens at the bullfight, where Carmen proclaims her love for the handsome but not very bright toreador, and the soldier kills her to death.

I'm starting to get a little tired of operas about childish cruel people, but I guess an opera about kind, peaceful, mature adults wouldn't be very interesting? Carmen totally got what she deserved for her flirtatious assholery. Plus she's reading the Tarot cards throughout the opera, so she knows she's going to die, and when the time comes, she's practically insistent on it. The soldier's like, "Come away with me," and she's like, "No! Kill me if you must!" Dude didn't say anything about killing, lady, he's still thinking with his pants - you put that whole killing idea in his head. Also, the way the set in that last scene was designed, she so could've gotten away from him if she'd just gone to the right instead of trying to sneak around him to the left (other people had been coming and going to the right earlier in the act, so it's not like there was an invisible wall over there). The other thing that bothered me is that there's no mention in the last scene of the soldier's mother or the girl next door, when a good amount of time is spent in Act I setting up his genuine devotion to dear ol' Mom, who apparently died and he's too obsessed with Carmen to even grieve. So I definitely found the plot a little lacking.

The singing and the music, however, were terrific. I particularly enjoyed David Pomeroy's performance as Don Jose, the moron corporal. Rinat Shaham brought just the right amount of sass and sex appeal as Carmen, and Ailyn Perez was really likeable as the too-perfect too-nice Micaela. The music was fantastic - I hadn't realized how familiar all of these pieces are and how often they're used in pop culture. Set design, as per usual, was excellent, with the same basic set layout acting as a public square in Seville outside the cigar factory, the inside of a seedy inn, a supposedly deserted place in the mountains, and a bullfighting ring.