By Anne Midgette
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 10, 2008

It's interesting to imagine what it would be like if a professional theater company staged "Hamlet" the way most professional opera companies stage "Carmen."

"Carmen," which Washington National Opera opened Saturday night at the Kennedy Center, has become a veritable symbol of opera. It's among the most popular works in the repertory, filled with Bizet's hit tunes, love and death -- a company that puts it on is virtually guaranteed good ticket sales. As a result, productions of the work tend to be like rereadings of a child's favorite bedtime story. We already know and accept the plot. Carmen is a drop-dead sexpot and a Gypsy to boot. So all the company has to do is go through the motions: Stick everyone in costumes and let the singer playing Carmen go flouncing around the stage while men fall at her feet.

The equivalent in "Hamlet" might be an actor flinging back his head, pressing the back of his hand to his brow, and crying at the top of his lungs, "To be! Or not, to BE!" The difference is that in "Hamlet," audiences might not be as willing to accept this as a placeholder for actual acting.

It is certainly possible to delve deeper into "Carmen," and there is a heck of a good opera in there; take David McVicar's 2002 Glyndebourne production (available on DVD). But depth is not necessarily what anyone -- singers or audiences -- truly wants. "Carmen" provides what opera companies are supposed to provide: familiarity and spectacle, not dramatic verisimilitude (particularly when the story is, let's face it, such a downer). And familiarity and spectacle are on offer in David Gately's production, which came to Washington from the Austin Lyric Opera.

Or at least the expectation of spectacle. I was struck that, when the curtain rose on the final scene, there was a burst of applause, evidently prompted by the mere fact that the women of the chorus were wearing brightly colored dresses (the costumes, by Lennart Mörk, are from WNO's 1995 production). Allen Charles Klein's modular sets were the same as they had been all evening: big stone walls emblazoned with promotions for Escamillo's bullfight, arranged in one more permutation.

"Carmen" this year is a vehicle for Denyce Graves, Washington's quintessential hometown girl made good. If "Carmen" is a symbol of opera, Graves has become a symbol of "Carmen." She has worked her interpretation into a polished whole that seems impregnable; there is no place where you can open it up to get inside. In a rather striking program note, the singer complains that Carmen has no real contemplative aria; "she is deeper than what is sometimes illustrated in her music." That Graves believes this was reflected in a performance that didn't, in fact, allow you in to any depth.

What it did show was the character's anarchy, which bled over into the musical interpretation. Graves's voice is arresting: big and with an edge that slices through any other music going on around her. No fake mezzo posturing here: This singer's treasure is her rich basso low register, stealing the thunder of the men and representing a strong foundation for both her singing and her image of the character. Her upper notes are of a different, drier color; she can't dig into the meat of the sound here in the same way she does at the bottom.

Meanwhile, Carmen's signature demand for freedom extended to a frequent unwillingness to be restrained by the dictates of the score or the conductor with regard to pitch, rhythm or tempo. This led to some shaky moments when other people were singing with her -- in, for instance, the smugglers' quintet in Act 2.

With a big-name singer in the title role, "Carmen" enables a company to surround her with some less known quantities. While it is commendable to encourage young singers, WNO too often serves as a proving ground for winners of Plácido Domingo's Operalia competition and its own apprentice program, and putting too many untried singers up onstage can erode a house's claim to international stature. Thiago Arancam, the handsome young tenor who sang Don José, just won a handful of prizes at Operalia in September (admittedly well after WNO engaged him); he may or may not have a promising career ahead of him, and he certainly has some fine notes in his voice, but Don José in a company of this size is a bit much for him now. His warm, virile-sounding tenor was uneven, and it paled when subtlety or line were called for, as in the "Flower Song." He was at his best hurling out climactic notes at a fever pitch of emotion, sometimes perilously close to screaming.

The Escamillo, Alexander Vinogradov, a past Operalia winner also making his company debut, fared considerably better. He represented that rare species of baritone who can actually make an effect in the "Toreador Song," which lies low for most baritones. Vinogradov has a low, dark voice that is also agile and not too big, and every note of the part lay easily within his range. All he needs is a bit more development of the persona to go with it. Among the other performers, Sabina Cvilak was a pretty, pleasant-voiced Micaëla and John Marcus Bindel was a more than usually convincing Zuniga, with a swagger and assertive presence.

Julius Rudel, the veteran conductor, led a slightly wistful reading in the pit: slow, ruminative, with an edge of poignancy in the flute solo of the Act 3 introduction. If it wasn't a clean performance -- the WNO Orchestra seems to have a tendency to be slightly sloppy, and Graves created some extra problems of coordination -- it was a well-observed one, with an awareness of inner voices that kept rising up out of the stream of more familiar melody.

The drama was not much furthered by the production as a whole, which conveys a nonspecific historicity. This version of the opera has less of the spoken French dialogue -- a boon, since much of it was incomprehensible. That Arancam pronounced the "n" at the ends of words like "un" and "non," and that the Russian-born Vinogradov used a Russian silent "g," so that "regard" which came out "re-ard," is less an indictment of WNO than of a pervasive lack of adequate singer preparation in today's opera world.

Yet how can opera be truly dramatic if no one attends to the dramatic details? Another example is the blocking of the chorus, which, as so often happens (and certainly not only at WNO), frequently seemed to be running around the stage simply to assume the positions required of them, rather than acting under the impulse of any character motivation. Take the final scene, when the crowd comes pouring out of the bullfighting arena: Several members of the chorus had to gallop behind the dead Carmen to take their places at the other side of the stage. Why? Why not, more believably, have them freeze in horror on the spot at the grisly sight, even if it means massing them at one side of the stage? If this kind of thing happened in "Hamlet," someone might protest. But in "Carmen," well, that's just opera.

Carmen by Georges Bizet, in French with English surtitles, at the Kennedy Center Opera House in six more performances through Nov. 19. Call 202-295-2400 or visit http://www.dc-opera.org.