Damian Lillard blasts Warriors leak of Draymond video, says Poole should have been ready.Fleet Week, Blue Angels cancel Sunday air show due to fog.
#San francisco opera carmen serial#
Survivor of suspected Stockton serial killer speaks out: 'They didn't listen to me'.Remarkable piece of WWII history emerges from California's Lake Shasta.Horoscope for Monday, 10/10/22 by Christopher Renstrom.California to become first state to discontinue this common grocery store item.Irene Roberts’ self-contained, musically precise account of the title role on opening night gave way on Saturday to a wilder version - more full-throated, less tightly disciplined - from Ginger Costa-Jackson. The double casting, meanwhile, threw a little light on things by opening up small but telling contrasts in the characterizations. And though Montanaro made room for expansive lyricism on occasion, his preference for sleek rhythms over sultry ones gave the drama a much-needed propulsiveness and sense of purpose. The orchestral playing was fiercely on point both Friday and Saturday, from the breathlessly fast and hard-edged prelude through the explosive conclusion. The most concentrated dramatic charge during the opening weekend came not from the stage but from the orchestra pit, where conductor Carlo Montanaro made a company debut of fire and steel. Bieito and revival director Joan Anton Rechi wrangle crowds deftly - the excitement of the audience for the bullfight in Act 4 is palpable, and Ian Robertson’s Opera Chorus and the uncredited children’s chorus sang superbly - but interactions between individual characters often feel wan and uninflected. If these sound like pasteboard figures, they are drawn from the stage of the War Memorial, where scene after scene unfolded with more attention to visual imagery than interpersonal detail. The bullfighter Escamillo, with his knowing swagger, is in thrall to an alluring but limited concept of masculinity, while the ingenue Micaëla - even in a portrait refreshingly less simpering than some - is redolent of the chaste comforts of home. The title character is still using sexuality as a medium of exchange for personal freedom, and Don José, the soldier who falls under her erotic sway, is the same mass of psychic conflicts he’s always been. Perhaps that’s because in essence, Bieito’s conception of “Carmen” is not much more probing or deeply thought-out than those of his more tradition-minded predecessors. The directorial flourishes sit atop the proceedings like raisins on a cake, imparting a little momentary flavor but never forging a thematic connection with the fundamental drama. Yet one searches in vain for an animating theatrical vision beneath these details, some sense of what Carmen’s story is meant to convey.
(“I’m speechless,” one of them gasped, self-refutingly.)Īnd Bieito, to his credit, doesn’t shy away from the violence inherent in this work - not only the sexual struggles among the opera’s Gypsies, workers, smugglers and soldiers, but the political violence implicit in a military presence, which he underscores by placing the action in late 20th century Ceuta, one of the two autonomous Spanish cities in Northern Africa. There are several crotch clinches and a quickly simulated act of oral sex that even under cover of a parked car was enough to drive a pair of opening-night patrons from the house. There’s a fully naked man who strikes poses during the entr’acte while slapping his phenomenally sculpted abs, and plenty more beefcake of a limited sort. Sure, this “Carmen” includes a handful of directorial strokes designed to startle the staid.
This is one of Bieito’s signature creations, frequently revived over the past decade and a half, and although the external trappings of controversy are in place, nobody’s heart seems to be in it. The production of Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” that opened over the weekend at the War Memorial Opera House in a pair of performances with alternating casts is in fact a bland and dismayingly inert concoction at its core.