Carmen, the MTV Diva

By TERRY TEACHOUT

Carmen is a tattooed nightclub singer in a Tina Turner wig who smuggles Uzis after hours. Escamillo, her bullfighting boyfriend, looks as if he's been getting fashion tips from Wayne Newton's tailor. The orchestra is seated onstage, midway between five video screens and six hydraulic lifts; the conductor wears a leather vest, and the director's credits include a stint as Mick Jagger's choreographer. And everybody is miked, from the tenor to the timpani player.

This is opera, right? Absolutely, says David Gockley, general director of the Houston Grand Opera, which has mounted an up-to-the-second production of Georges Bizet's Carmen to show off its new portable outdoor stage, a $1.4 million innovation designed to get the much admired company out of its fancy downtown theater and into the lives of Houstonians who don't know Don Jose from Donald Duck. Gockley calls it "nothing less than a new way to produce opera." Irreverent locals dubbed the show Carmen a-go-go but turned out to cheer. More than 7,000 paying customers braved record-breaking heat to attend the May 30 inaugural performance at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in suburban Houston.

The production is the brainchild of New York City theatrical designers Ken Billington and Kenneth Foy. Its centerpiece is a 50,000-lb. steel-and-Plexiglas modular stage that resembles those used by touring rock bands. The main playing area is flanked by twin lighting towers and live-action video screens, and three additional upstage screens are used for scenic projections. The entire package can be loaded into six tractor trailers, and a state-of-the-art sound system facilitates performances in large outdoor amphitheaters.

Why bother? According to Gockley, Houston Grand Opera, which is internationally renowned for its avant-garde productions, had come to be seen by its hometown as elitist. "The political and funding community," he says, "was telling us, 'We know you have a certain stature, but if you don't begin to reach and touch more people, you're going to gradually drop off our priority list.'" So he asked Billington and Foy to create a fully portable stage suitable for special performances aimed at young, TV-oriented viewers unfamiliar with opera. "What does rock 'n' roll do? That was our mandate," Billington explains.

The same logic dictated Gockley's unorthodox choice of director. "They came to me and said, 'Do this opera,' and I said, 'You're crazy! I don't know from opera!'" says Michele Assaf, who choreographs musical comedies and rock videos. But her inexperience turned out to be a blessing. While many directors now treat 19th century opera as an opportunity to stuff unsuspecting audiences full of identity politics (the oppression of Gypsy women under late capitalism, say), Assaf was content to interpret the world's most popular opera as a straightforward tale of love and death. "It's a story, it's music, it's movement," she says with a shrug.

Though the company billed its new Carmen as the next best thing to a rock concert, the results were closer in style to a rip-roaring Broadway show, an impression strengthened by the use of Bizet's original opera-comique version, in which the dialogue is spoken rather than sung, and a refreshingly colloquial English translation by Sheldon Harnick (Fiddler on the Roof). Updated it was, but dumbed down it wasn't. Assaf made her dramatic points with crisp simplicity and no pandering whatsoever. No less direct was the Carmen of mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzman, a fire-eating singing actress who played straight to the video cameras, giving a devastatingly sexy performance full of anger and pride. It all added up to a no-nonsense Carmen that anybody could believe in.

Houston has funding for four more years of outdoor productions, though no operas have been set yet. Next January the stage will be moved indoors for a production of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, starring Frederica von Stade. Several other opera houses have expressed interest in this new approach, and no doubt similar stages will soon be under construction. But the best thing about Houston's contemporary Carmen is not so much the modular stage, impressive though it is, as what Assaf has done with it. How do you get twentysomethings to fall for opera? The answer is the same now as it was a century ago: make it real.