1) Getting up at 9:00 AM with a headache, the consequence of having stayed up so late the night before — well, let’s just say it colored my morning. And really, the rest of the daylight hours. I wrote my pages in a crowded breakfast room, spent the rest of the morning reading and writing, and only went out to collect my shirts from the dry cleaner and grab a sandwich.
2) With the help of a brief nap and a couple Tylenol, I put myself together for my Big Night at the Opera, Carmen at Covent Garden. There haven’t been many opportunities for full canonicals since I left the Queen Mary II May 12, but the opera is always one. And if I do say so myself, I looked splendid.
2a) Back in 2022, I found a wonderful bottle of cologne in Granada because I wanted to take the scent of Spanish orange with me after that remarkable trip. Three years later, I couldn’t even coax the last drop out of the bottle. Farewell, scent of Spain! I still won’t forget you.
3) I indulged in an early dinner at the Ivy on Kensington High Street. I thought it would be easier to eat near my hotel rather than hunt around restaurants near Covent Garden with everyone else going to the opera. And my gamble paid off: a lovely little dinner of shredded duck (basically tuna salad with duck) and pickles, a minute steak, and two negronis. And then it was off to the Underground with The First Celebrities, Kensington High Street to Earls Court, change to the Piccadilly Line, and straight on to Covent Garden.
4) This was only my second performance at Covent Garden (the first was Aida in 2023). My first descriptions of it came from Clemence Dane’s gigantic novel The Flower Girls (as much as I enjoy it, I can’t recommend; it’s just so long and meandering), and it still thrilled me to recognize how accurately she described it, with all the pink lampshades on the balcony sconces, and Uncle Paxton’s choice of the best seat in the house: front and center of the top balcony.
4a) This time I noticed another detail from the novel, a staircase divided by a brass rail.
No photography during the performance.
4b) But my own seat was the level three balcony, second row center. I had a superb view.
5) It’s my fate in life to arrive early to sit on the aisle so I can stand aside for everyone in the center of the row arriving in the 90 seconds before the curtain goes up. I accept my fate gladly, knowing I’ll be out of the theatre more quickly than they.
6) My first encounter with Carmen was when I was in college and someone gave me a double LP of the entire opera with Regina Resnik as Carmen and Joan Sutherland as Micaela. And it’s so beautiful you wish Georges Bizet had lived to write another; there’s nothing like Carmen. This would be my first time to see it live.
7) The house was agreeably full. During the overture I heard a murmur of familiarity through the house when the Toreador theme was played.
8) Carmen is an opera about people operating on the fringes of society — factory workers, smugglers, possibly corrupt cops — which feels easy to forget when set with lots of Period Quaintness or Spanish™ accessories like fringed shawls, fans, and tortoiseshell combs. Not this production. Set in the early 1970s, lots of overalls and cotton shifts, polyester shirts with long collars, short shorts, stripes, bright colors. On her first entrance, Carmen looked like Rosie the Riveter, but with a red rose tied in the knot of her red bandana. All the sets — the police station, Lillas Pastia’s desolate roadhouse, the mountain warehouse of the smugglers, the dry weedy ground outside Escamillo’s dressing room — looked like desolate sun-baked Hell.
8a) This concept was never more vivid than in the presentation of Micaela, not as a beautiful but shy village maiden, but as a 1970s nerd girl with big glasses, center-parted long hair, and an ugly plaid skirt.
8b) Carmen’s costumes captured what we think of as Spanish™Style, but with a sleazy 1970s twist: a wrap dress with flounces that malfunctioned easily, a leather miniskirt with a red blouse, bell bottoms with a midriff-baring ruffled top.
9) The children’s chorus, so important to Carmen, got an additional workout by introducing the last three acts with letter placards spelling out the time, e.g. “Deux semaines plus tard.”
9a) I have an ambivalent relationship with supertitles, but acknowledge how helpful they are.
10) Smuggling never sounded so light and airy as it does in the quintet in Act II. But the active presence of guns on stage cut through that dainty illusion. (I can’t tell you all the ways.)
11) The death of Carmen did not involve a gun, or a knife, and was difficult to watch.
12) And speaking of Don José, the action in Act I made clear how little his fellow officers thought of him, which surprised me. He was the most polished and put together of them all, until Carmen’s flirtations forced him to loosen his tie. His look only degraded further throughout.
13) But possibly the most startling innovation was the silent presence of the spirit of Don José’s mother, dressed in black dress and sweater as many a Spanish peasant widow, a constant presence in the life of her son. She participated in the action once, to great effect.
14) Human emotion is clumsy, and this production did not hide from that clumsiness.
15) Going to the theatre can be clumsy, too, but most of us try. I was seated one in from the aisle, and at the start of Act I a young woman, lost and confused, asked if the vacant aisle seat was taken. “Not by me,” I said. With only one intermission, that could have been thorny for whoever did have that seat. And we found out during the Act II overture, when latecomers were seated (a hubbub): an older, ponderous woman both unhappy and anxious, and apparently accompanied by two men seated nearby but not together.
15a) The opera may have been sung in French, but that still doesn’t give you the right to speak Italian on a speakerphone in the men’s lavatory. Just astonishingly bad manners.
15b) And during the Act III overture, after intermission, an usher had to speak out loud to tell someone to stop recording or otherwise using their phone. It was startling.
16) The curtain calls were rapturuous and enthusiastic, especially for the leads. But I was interested to note how the ladies handled their bows in their 1970s costumes. The singers who played Frasquita and Mercedes (I can never remember which is which) took different approaches: the first took her time marching on stage and bowed from the waist; the latter almost hurried to her place, and gave a traditional curtsy in her minidress. Micaela, in what could have been a postulant’s uniform, curtsied and blew kisses, while Carmen, in bellbottom jeans, ran to the center of the stage and bowed from the waist, hands on her knees. The joy she communicated!
17) A rarity, I had a clear shot at the exit, and I did all but run for it when the curtain finally started coming down. And didn’t meet any obstacles until I was down two floors. That never happens.
18) What a night! And what a throng trying to get into Covent Garden station! At least there were lifts.
19) Back on Kensington High Street, I impulsively decided on a post-concert drink at the Ivy. “We just closed,” the hostess whispered to me. “Just one negroni!” I pleaded . . . and she ushered me into the bar. And it was lovely.