English choreographer Matthew Bourne is primarily known this side of the Atlantic for his stunning spin on Swan Lake. The inspiration for the unforgettable revision was portraying every all the swans mesmerizing the prince as men. Beautifully rendered as is the entire version of the ballet, the scenes with the male swans are what audiences waited for—with Bourne nabbing the 1999 Tony as best director of a musical.
The result of this acclaim is that as of this moment that Bourne’s Swan Lake is considered the abundantly creative man’s masterpiece. At least stateside, where (dance) audiences aren’t as familiar as his homeland followers are with his impressive body of work.
The unfortunate happenstance may be about to change now that this month he’s streaming four of his New Adventures. As a matter of not quite fact but perhaps convincing opinion, the second of the quartet (Swan Lake was predictably the first) may give the Tchaikovsky item a run for its much-reaped money. (In an introduction, Bourne stipulates that he does not head a ballet troupe but “a contemporary dance theater company.”)
This newer hyperkinetic affair is The Car Man. Even only moderately astute readers may have already pegged the contemporary dance as Bourne’s intrepid wrestle with the Georges Bizet opera (librettists Henri Meilhac, Ludovic Halévy from the Prosper Mérimée novel).
But is Bourne content with the source material? True to form, he isn’t. He manipulates it this way and that, with Terry Davies gerrymandering the music to suite Bourne’s needs and dropping all the lyrics of course. Most of the beloved Bizet tunes, conducted by Brett Morris, are heard but not necessarily in the familiar sequences. Incidentally, some (many?) Bizet worshippers may miss—but for a few bars—the magnificent quintet. (Perhaps Bourne tried incorporating it but ultimately not to his satisfaction.)
The story Bourne tells is an inside-out remake. To begin with and as the title suggests, the Carmen here is a car man, a narrow-eyed drifter called Luca (Chris Trenfield), who shows up at a body shop-cum-diner in Harmony (pop. 325), a southwestern American town, circa the 1950s. He’s looking for a job. More importantly, he’s looking for trouble—and finds it, don’t ya know? (Lez Brotherston is the set and costume designer, Chris Davey the lighting designer, Paul Groothuis, the lighting designer.)
At Dino’s diner—Dino is played by Alan Vincent—Luca spots Dino’s much younger wife, Lana (Zizi Strallen), and their stares lock to no good end. Hanging around the cars (half cars, actually) are a number of louts and their girlfriends, who enjoy mocking Dino’s hired helper Angelo (Dominic North), whose only sympathizer is Lana’s sister Rita (Kate Lyons). Those two fall as hard for each other as do Luca and the alliterative Lana. This means that in the ill-fated proceedings not a one of them is smiling gaily at fade-out.
It may be that the synopsis will remind some not of Carmen but of something much more like another more recent box-office success. It may help to know that young Matthew Bourne was a huge lover of Hollywood projects. When Bourne co-founded New Adventures, it was named Adventures in Motion Pictures. Which might explain why The Car Man more explicitly registers not so much as Mérimée as it does James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, wherein a drifter arrives at a diner run by an older proprietor and his younger wife and nothing but headaches and heartaches and bloody bellyaches ensue. (Yes, in 1944 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released the cautionary tale with Lana Turner—note the Lana nod here—John Garfield, and Cecil Kellaway.)
Directing The Car Man, as if revving a souped-up engine, Bourne goes for dancing marked by a rare quality in which awkwardness somehow transforms into unexpected grace. He opens with an ensemble piece that looks as if an athletic club workout has edged into a startling corps de ballet showcase. Immediately, the audience understands it’s in for vulgarity magically beautified.
Throughout he spotlights the major players, giving, for instance, Trenfield’s Luca most of Bizet’s (and Carmen’s) habanera. He doesn’t shy from numerous pas de deux as torrid sex scenes, Trenfield and Strallen sending off special heat. (Strallen, of London’s gifted Strallen sisters Scarlett, Summer and Saskia, was a sensation last year in the West End’s non-Bourne musical adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom. With any luck, she and it will land here eventually.)
Bourne cannot be considered without mention of his dallying with homoeroticism. It’s as if he’s saying, yes, some male dancers are gay and so why ignore it? In The Car Man Luca makes not only Lana his prey but Angelo, who’s far from resistant. Needless to say, in Swan Lake the focal pair, the lead swan and the prince, rhapsodically long for each other. Often, Bourne plays up the humor in homosexuality.
Is there anything wrong with this Car Man offering? A nitpicker might say that every once in a while cameras dart in for close-ups momentarily obscuring a preferred stage picture. Otherwise, rank this as yet another Matthew Bourne masterpiece.
Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man was streamed beginning March 5, 2021 and will remain online through March 21. Information and tickets: nycc.vhx.tv
