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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

Return of the lady in red

June 29, 2018 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review Classic Stage Company’s revival of Carmen Jones. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

The history of the Broadway musical in the Forties is in essence the story of Oscar Hammerstein II. After going for 11 anxious years without a hit, Hammerstein finally teamed up with Richard Rodgers. The duo then knocked out “Oklahoma!” and “Carousel” back to back, and Hammerstein spent the rest of his life counting money. Yet he also scored another hit in between those two legendary smashes, this one without Rodgers: “Carmen Jones,” an all-black modern-dress version of Georges Bizet’s much-loved opera, came to Broadway in 1943, ran there for 503 performances, toured the country, and was turned a decade later into an equally popular film. No opera has had a longer Broadway run. But “Carmen Jones” dropped out of sight after Otto Preminger’s screen version opened in 1952, and Classic Stage Company’s slimmed-down new revival, directed by John Doyle, is its first New York staging of any consequence since the original production. The result is a major find, a show that deserves to return to Broadway and will surely end up there.

So what happened to “Carmen Jones” in the meantime? It came to be regarded as a racially condescending period piece. James Baldwin famously roasted Preminger’s film version, dismissing it as “tasteless and vulgar…ludicrously false and affected” in a 1955 Commentary essay that was long taken to be the last word on Hammerstein’s transformation of Bizet’s opera into a tale of love and death in a World War II parachute factory….

All credit, then, belongs to Mr. Doyle for realizing that Hammerstein’s English-language adaptation of the most popular of all 19th-century operas, far from being condescending, is in fact a completely straightforward translation of Bizet’s opera into contemporary terms….

As for Mr. Doyle’s small-scale staging, performed by a cast of 10 and accompanied by a six-piece band, it is simple, subtle and wonderfully lucid, and features a performance of the title role by Anika Noni Rose for which the word “hot” is a wan understatement. No doubt you could strike matches off Ms. Rose’s blood-red dress, but you wouldn’t need to: They’d probably burst into flame all by themselves….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Simon Callow talks about his 1990 Old Vic revival of Carmen Jones:

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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