Brian Arreola and Cara Schaefer in ‘ Le Cabaret de Carmen.’ Photo by RX Loft. The IN Series version includes a rape scene (which is why there is an “explicit content” warning on the website), knife fights over seemingly inconsequential slights, and Gladstone punching the private parts of her whore-employee Carmen, sung by the sexy, transcendent mezzo-soprano Cara Schaefer. In a program note, Nelson lauds this approach, but critiques Brook’s unwillingness to fully explore the work’s abject cruelty. In 1981, the English theater director Peter Brook, a hero of Nelson’s, rejiggered Bizet’s work as La Tragedie de Carmen into a piece stripped clean of all but the central characters and more than half of its original score.
It’s yet another point of departure for how opera is traditionally produced.īizet based his 1875 work on a Prosper Mérimée novella in which an imprisoned soldier teeters into madness and goes on a murderous rampage, with the eponymous character as his final victim. “It changes from night to night, according to the mood of the audience,” he told me after the show.
This kind of improvised staging is encouraged by Nelson. Set as an early 20 th Century cabaret, some audience members are seated on stage, allowing the sadistic Madame Pastia, a non-singing role fiercely played by Lydia Gladstone, to occasionally bemuse them with racy taunts before wandering into the house to cast a little shade on other patrons. Sequins and ruffles replace robes and flounce. Instead of supertitles, slides with the French-to-English translations are projected on the wall in scrolly frames, à la silent movies. There is a stage director but no conductor. There are only four singers, two actors, and three musicians, most of whom are locally sourced. Instead of three hours (excluding intermissions), this performance runs about 80 minutes, with no intermission. Such is the case with his Le Cabaret de Carmen which opened at the Source Theater this weekend.īased on the opera Carmen by Georges Bizet, in this production, there is no orchestra pit between performers and ticket holders. Not long after IN Series founder Carla Hübner handed over control to Nelson, he re-branded the 40-year-old company as “Opera that speaks, theater that sings.” It is this neither-one-nor-the-other quality of Nelson’s productions that make them difficult to place in the context of what opera-goers in particular expect. Cara Schaefer in ‘ Le Cabaret de Carmen.’ Photo by RX Loft. “It’s hard to sell new interpretations in this city because there is so much theater already going on, and it’s the theater audience that I want,” Nelson said. We were discussing his ultimate goal of creating a demand in DC for a dramatic arts genre that blends opera with theater. “I want us to be in contention for a Helen Hayes Award,” IN Series artistic director Timothy Nelson told me last fall over coffee near his office in the Shaw neighborhood.
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