By Robert Croan
For the third and final production of her first season as Florida Grand Opera’s general director and CEO, Maria Todaro took on the multiple tasks of stage director and even costume designer to produce her personal take on Bizet’s perennial favorite, Carmen [seen April 26 at the Broward Center].
A retired mezzo-soprano who was once a successful Carmen herself, Todaro re-set the story in Franco’s Spain of 1937, the heroine no longer a gypsy stereotype, but a courageous freedom fighter against a fascistic, authoritarian regime. Todaro’s persuasive and credible end product, without changing the original words or music, held thought-provoking present-day implications, including more violence, political undertones and characters easily relatable to a contemporary audience. It’s not the first time Carmen has been updated to this period, but Todaro had her own ideas, and for the most part they worked. Only the contrived ending, with José drowning Carmen in a water trough, hit a jarring and unconvincing chord.
Most people who attend Carmen don’t know that the work Georges Bizet created for the Paris Opéra-Comique in 1875 was in the form we now associate with Broadway musicals: songs and ensembles interspersed with spoken dialogue. The musical continuity of today’s standard Carmen was provided by Bizet’s friend, Ernest Guiraud, after the composer’s premature death, when Carmen outgrew its light opera beginnings and became a repertory piece for the world’s largest houses.
Todaro opted for the standard version, emphasizing the serious elements on a unit set by Allen Charles Klein that placed the bullfight arena stage right and the cigarette factory stage left — serving less successfully as Lillas Pastia’s inn and the smugglers’ mountain gorge in the opera’s middle acts. The carefree choruses and banter that take up the opera’s opening scenes — well prepared by Jared Peroune — took on ominous connotations with the soldiers’ potential abuse of the innocent Micaëla and the cigarette girls’ general air of dissatisfaction. No lighthearted beginnings here; even the children’s chorus members were a pretty nasty bunch.
And from Carmen’s entrance nearly half an hour into the show — in the person of the physically mesmerizing and vocally magnetic Ginger Costa-Jackson — this was definitely all business. She is a singing actress to reckon with. Even dressed essentially like her fellow cigarette girls, she stood out on her upstage entrance and took focus first with her penetrating eyes (even from stage distance) and her vibrant, very individual vocal timbre.
She injected the “Habanera” with a broad palette of vocal colors, and metallic chest tones that she could bring way up into the soprano range. It’s not the largest sound, but it penetrated through all the ensembles and the most voluminous orchestral underpinnings. She lightened her delivery for the “Seguidilla,” then brought a totally new approach to the dance-based numbers in the second act, and a cavernous shading to the portentous predictions of the Act 3 Card Scene. In her acting she was sexy without being vulgar, dissimilar in demeanor and timbre when interacting with the simple corporal Don José and the superstar toreador Escamillo.
In the novella by Prosper Mérimée that was the basis for the opera’s libretto, the central character is actually Don José, the soldier from the Spanish countryside whose downfall is the eponymous femme fatale. Rafael Davila made his role equal to that of Carmen, with a robust portrayal and a ringing tenor sonority that Todaro used to great effect by having him return from jail in Act 2 singing his army song full voice while walking down the aisles of the theater. He followed with a handsomely vocalized Flower Aria, tossing off the challenging upward scale to a high B-flat with deceptive ease.
Mezzo Costa-Jackson happens to have two singing sisters, Miriam and Marina, both sopranos, and it was an interesting idea to have them alternate in the role of Micaëla. Todaro carried the gimmick even further by having all three together in a single performance, one of them in the supporting part of Frasquita. At the performance I attended, Miriam Costa-Jackson showed a bright, hearty soprano that blossomed in the upper octave, and a spunky characterization that emerged as a kind of blond-wigged anti-Carmen — especially with the family resemblance. Only in her exquisite third act aria, “Je dis que rien ne m’épouvante,” did she disappoint. She was unsteady in the heavier lines, and not quite able to give the words sufficient nuance. The Escamillo of baritone Alexander Birch Elliott also lacked nuance, his iconic aria nicely vocalized, but lacking in charisma and subtlety.
Supporting roles were well-realized by FGO Studio artists: Sydney Dardis and Mary Burke Barber as Carmen’s sidekicks Frasquita and Mercédès, Andrew Payne and James A. Mancuso as the smugglers Dancaïro and Remendado. Their intricate quintet (with Carmen) was a highlight. Joseph Canuto Leon made much of the mini-aria allotted to the Sergeant Morales, while Phillip Lopez enacted the ill-fated Captain Zuniga with relish.
The orchestra, under Ramón Tebar, however, was in poor form, several scraggly solos marring the lovely interludes.