Carmen Jones was crafted by Oscar Hammerstein II during the lowest point of his remarkable career. It was early 1942 and his latest musical, Sunny River, had flopped after a month-long stint. He had not delivered a Broadway hit in seven years. With no offers and nothing better to do, Hammerstein occupied himself with a pet project, which was developing a modern-day American version of Carmen, Georges Bizet’s hot-blooded and highly melodic opera from 1875.
Hammerstein updated and transferred the action from Spain to the Deep South, where the cigarette factory that employed Carmen now makes parachutes for the World War II effort. Possibly inspired by the beautifully sung Porgy and Bess and Four Saints in Three Acts, the writer reworked the original’s raffish Spanish characters as African-Americans. Escamillo, the bullfighter, becomes Husky Miller, a boxing champ. Don Jose is now simply Joe, a nice Army corporal policing the factory, while Michaela, his faithful hometown sweetheart, is rechristened Cindy Lou. Carmen, that ever-tempestuous creature, gains a surname but she otherwise remains a “hip-swingin’ floozie” who drives men wild.
The story stays mostly the same, as Joe’s entanglement with Carmen gets him into trouble with his superiors and he goes AWOL. Instead of heading for the mountains as they do in the opera, Carmen and Joe hop a train for Chicago, where her subsequent fling with Husky Miller drives Joe crazy with jealousy. The conclusion is a fated and fatal one, as always.
Hammerstein scarcely completed Carmen Jones when he teamed up that summer with Richard Rodgers on what became Oklahoma! in 1943. Later that year, as Rodgers reunited with Lorenz Hart for a revised version of their A Connecticut Yankee, impresario Billy Rose lavishly produced Carmen Jones to great success on Broadway with a 100-member company. “Wonderful, quite wonderful,” proclaimed The New York Times critic, along with practically everybody else.
Carmen Jones was made into a movie starring Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte, but somehow it never enjoyed a major New York revival until now, when Classic Stage Company’s new production opened tonight. Our Broadway Musicals 101 class now over, let’s tell you something about the show:
John Doyle, CSC’s artistic director, believes that less is more, so this Carmen Jones has been trimmed back to 90 minutes, no intermission, and is performed by a lively 10-member ensemble supported by six musicians, who are situated in a gallery above the action. The arena-type stage is a planked floor, while designer Scott Pask’s minimal décor stacks green boxes against a wall, hangs above the floor several industrial-style lamps with revolving fans and roughs up the theater’s brick walls. For the scene in a Chicago nightclub, white parachute fabric is tented over the action.
Performed within these intimate circumstances, the fast-moving show proves to be fiery with feeling. Dressed by Ann Hould-Ward literally as a scarlet woman, a sinuous Anika Noni Rose portrays Carmen as a bold and fearless beauty who lets nobody get in her way. Her insinuating rendition of the “Seguidilla,” known here as “Dere’s A Café on de Corner,” is especially seductive. Clifton Duncan’s depiction of Joe initially seems tentative but gradually grows in passion as he succumbs to Carmen’s charms. David Aron Damane makes an imposing Husky Miller, while Lindsay Roberts is girlish indeed as Cindy Lou. A vibrant Soara-Joy Ross leads the ensemble through “Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum,” which Bill T. Jones choreographs with earthy vigor. The company sings Bizet’s ever-compelling music quite handsomely.
In these sensitive times of cultural appropriation, Hammerstein’s 1940s usage of dis, dat and similar vernacular wordplay may make some viewers a tad uneasy, but there is no denying the easy flow of his lyrics and the straightforwardness of his libretto. Fluently staged by Doyle and performed so winningly, this Carmen Jones, like its heroine, is irresistible.
Carmen Jones opened June 27, 2018 at CSC and runs through August 19. Tickets and information: classicstage.org
