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Review: Bad girl makes good in a glorious 'Carmen Jones'

NEW YORK — By the time the woman in the cafe starts to sing that the music has taken over her body — her bones, her stomach, her heart — you’re in no position to question the diagnosis. You’ve been feeling that same, gut-deep response almost since the first notes were sounded in “Carmen Jones,” which opened on Wednesday at Classic Stage Co.

It is, on the contrary, sublime.

There’s no point trying to resist such sheer, distilled beauty. Your chances would be about as good as those of our helpless hero in escaping the erotic pull of the show’s title character, thrillingly embodied here by Anika Noni Rose.

And it all could have gone so wrong.

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That song about the viral effects of music, for example — its title is “Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum.” Its lyrics, when read on the page, should make any enlightened citizen of the 21st century wince. (Sample: “I know dere’s twen’y millyun tom-toms beatin’ way down deep.”) James Baldwin, writing about the 1954 film version of “Carmen Jones,” called the number “an abomination.”

This was a work, after all, that transliterated a 19th-centry French opera depicting the supposedly lusty, homicidal nature of Gypsies into a 20th-century spectacle depicting the supposedly lusty, homicidal nature of black people. And that language! Baldwin said it made African-Americans sound “ludicrously false and affected, like antebellum Negroes imitating their masters.”

Granted, the original Broadway show had been enthusiastically embraced when it opened during World War II. (The New York Times said it “has everything it needs to make great theater.”) But despite the occasional concert staging in recent years, “Carmen Jones” has seemed destined to languish in that hidden cabinet reserved for cultural curiosities from a racist era.

Doyle, however, has a way of taking a stethoscope to overdressed shows, listening for the compelling heartbeat beneath stereotyped surfaces and translating what he hears into elegantly spartan stagecraft. That was the approach to his Broadway interpretations of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd,” and, more surprisingly, the Tony-winning 2015 revival of “The Color Purple,” a musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s landmark novel, which had seemed bloatedly sentimental in its first New York outing in 2005.

But “Carmen Jones” may be his most unexpected act of reclamation. In this version at Classic Stage, where the British-born Doyle is the artistic director, the doomed title character and the people whose lives she damages often seem as timeless as the beautiful and damned of Greek tragedy.

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In its own way, this production is as primal and breathlessly seductive as the great director Peter Brook’s “La Tragédie de Carmen” (seen at Lincoln Center in 1983), which set Bizet’s opera in a bull ring. No voyeuristic detachment is allowed in this “Carmen Jones,” which has been electrically choreographed by Bill T. Jones; the audience feels what the characters feel, on the rutted road to a harrowing catharsis.

Such intensity of feeling is partly a matter of scale. The in-the-round (or rectangle) seating puts the audience right in the midst of the munitions factory and, later, the Chicago club in which the show takes place. Scott Pask’s bare-boards set, lighted with nowhere-to-hide clarity by Adam Honoré, consists of some sheets of parachute silk and olive-drab packing crates, which are put to multifarious use.

The orchestra is made up of six musicians in a balcony. And the cast has been shrunk to a select 10, who occasionally amuse themselves by flirting with the front row. Mostly, though, they exist entirely in the moment — which is to say, in the music.

And there you have the principal reason this “Carmen Jones” is so smashingly effective. Though Bizet’s resplendent score (freshly orchestrated by Joseph Joubert and directed by Shelton Becton) may have been whittled to pocket-size opera, Doyle and his team go with the magnetic flow and personality-shaping detail of the original composition.

Music is character here; it is also destiny. Its sweep is such that the lines between speech and song are eradicated. Listening to the lingo that so appalled Baldwin, it might as well be French — an exotic, serviceable vehicle for the thrust and parry of melody.

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And this cast isn’t singing like a bunch of Broadway belters. Opera purists may squawk, but for me every voice does justice not only to Bizet’s melodic richness but also to the inescapable fatalism of the story, as the music tugs everyone into combustible convergence.

As for Carmen herself, Rose, a Tony winner for “Caroline, or Change,” more than makes good on her character’s boast, that when she loves someone, “my baby, that’s the end of you.” Wearing snug, flame-color dresses (Ann Hould-Ward is the costume designer), her hips rolling like waves in a gentle surf, Rose nails the contemptuous arrogance of the sexiest girl in a small town.

But she gives Carmen the provincial girl’s naïve hunger for — and fear of — a bigger, more glamorous life. This discrepancy is reflected not just in her giveaway gaze and serpentine movement (thank Jones for the devastating Salome-style dance of enticement she performs) but, more important, in a soprano that unleashes itself into heady flights of rapture and sunken notes of anger and resignation.

As her chief prey, the virtuous Joe, a touchingly bewildered Clifton Duncan has a tenor that matches Rose’s mezzo in ways that remind you that, in opera, sex starts in the vocal cords. The theory is confirmed by David Aron Damane’s booming bass prizefighter, Husky Miller, who captures Carmen’s attention.

But the entire cast — which also notably includes a heartfelt Lindsay Roberts in the ingénue role of Cindy Lou — is first-rate, and each member creates a specifically defined individual whom you somehow feel you’ve met before. Yet when they cut loose for Jones’ centerpiece dance number, a stylized mix of shoulder-shaking swing and jive, everyone melts into an ecstatic harmony.

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That’s during the aforementioned “Beat Out Dat Rhythm.” The soloist here is the marvelous Soara-Joye Ross as Frankie, and for the duration of the song, she is the life force incarnate, exultant and undeniable.

There may be tragedy just around the corner, but for the immediate now, human existence seems like a blessed gift. Frankie concludes the song proclaiming there “ain’t but one big heart for the whole world,” and for those few radiant minutes, you actually believe her.

Production Notes:

“Carmen Jones”

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Through July 29 at Classic Stage Co., Manhattan; 866-811-4111, classicstage.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.

Credits: By Oscar Hammerstein II; music by Georges Bizet; directed by John Doyle; choreography by Bill T. Jones; sets by Scott Pask; costumes by Ann Hould-Ward; lighting by Adam Honoré; sound by Dan Moses Schreier; hair and wigs by Mia Neal; music supervisor and orchestrator, Joseph Joubert; music director, Shelton Becton; production stage manager, Bernita Robinson. Presented by Classic Stage Company, John Doyle, artistic director.

Cast: David Aron Damane (Husky Miller), Erica Dorfler (Myrt), Clifton Duncan (Joe), Andrea Jones-Sojola (Sally), Justin Keyes (Rum), Lindsay Roberts (Cindy Lou), Anika Noni Rose (Carmen Jones), Soara-Joye Ross (Frankie), Lawrence E. Street (Dink) and Tramell Tillman (Sergeant Brown).

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Ben Brantley © 2018 The New York Times

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