EXPO 86 : RIOTOUS, AVANT-GARDE ‘CARMEN’ IN VANCOUVER

Brian McMaster could have chosen an easy piece for the first major opera production at the Expo 86 World Festival.

The general director of the Vancouver Opera could have assembled a comfortable, familiar, old-fashioned, sentimental, easy-to-follow, popular ritual--say, Bizet’s “Carmen.”

But that isn’t his way. Instead, he tried something dangerous. Invoking the dreaded avant-garde, he put on a disturbing, provocative, complex, brutal, funny, imaginative theater piece with music--Bizet’s “Carmen.”

In its own madly iconoclastic way, it was wonderful.

This was “Carmen” as staged by Lucian Pintilie, an irreverent Romanian genius whose most prominent American credential is a production of “Tartuffe” at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.

At the “Carmen” opening here May 3, much of the audience at the 2,600-seat Queen Elizabeth Theatre reportedly went wild, and not with pleasure. Malcontent traditionalists booed and hissed. They cried foul. They cried sacrilege. They threw programs. They demanded McMaster’s head.

At the fifth and last performance Monday night, the response was wildly enthusiastic. Yesterday’s scandal apparently is today’s hot ticket.

Remember the nice old story of the tempestuous Gypsy girl with her hands perpetually stuck on her hips and a rose perpetually stuck in her teeth? Remember the glamorous mezzo-soprano who toils in a Sevillian cigarette factory, vamps a dumb soldier, goes off with a macho bullfighter and finally gets picturesquely stabbed in front of the Plaza de Toros?

Forget it.

Pintilie’s “Carmen,” created for the Welsh National Opera, pretends to be an improvised show within a show at a carnival. The central metaphor--which the flexible director sometimes stresses and sometimes ignores--is a nightmarish circus arena.

Radu Boruzescu’s unit set, superbly lit by Michael Spray, contains a central revolving platform--a quasi-carrousel--beneath a twirling canopy. The canopy supports trapezes and other devices that transform the singers, from time to time, into aerial daredevils.

In front of the carrousel, Pintilie has installed a tiny railroad track that permits the characters--usually Carmen--to enter and exit riding a multipurpose cart. Surrounding the carrousel we find a semicircular mountain of sandbags.

Remember the quaint and busy city square, the seedy inn of Lillas Pastia, the craggy campground and the bullring? Forget them.

Pintilie doesn’t care much about specific times and places. He gives us Brechtian alienation and accessible symbols. He gives us a virtuosic midget, clowns and acrobats, screaming children and a derisive throng.

The quasi-Greek chorus is assembled to watch the hoary “Carmen” tragedy, to participate in it, to mock it, to test it, to elevate it to a level where erstwhile push-button emotions cannot be taken for granted.

Jean Stilwell, the Carmen, caricatures her own considerable sensuality, strikes phony-alluring poses, rubs her body everywhere during the Habanera (and I do mean everywhere), taunts Jose mercilessly. Nevertheless, she assumes undeniable heroic pathos as the denouement approaches.

Jacque Trussel, the athletic, naturalistic Jose, is attired by Miruna Boruzescu in battle fatigues. All’s fair in love and war--all war--and war is hell. He emerges here as a dangerous hysteric whose precarious equilibrium crumbles eloquently as the opera progresses.

Tom Fox, the Escamillo, is a strutting, comic Elvis-esque idol. At his first appearance, given the excellent English-language version of John and Nell Moody, he actually feigns disapproval of the setting and the choral inattention, utters an expletive, followed by this deathless line:

“I’ll never sing in Vancouver again.”

He lapses into French on occasion, and in his aria executes raunchy, bravura pelvic thrusts.

Martha Collins--the eternal ingenue, Micaela--is a blind innocent who indulges in kicky-balletic sighs and whimpers when involved in the action. When not involved, she reverts to type. She laughs, kisses an unoccupied soldier, joins the attendant choristers on the sandbags. She, too, is a lusty wench.

Pintilie obviously has no patience for anything approaching the cliched, the conventional and the maudlin. Invariably, he buries the sweet stuff in parody.

Communal merrymaking, yelling and laughing all but obliterate the too-familiar prelude. Unison finger-snapping punctuates the Toreador Song. Snowflakes are tossed from the canopy top by stagehands when love music--as opposed to sex music--beckons. Children in white wings--mini-angels!-strike prayerful attitudes while Micaela sings to Jose of his saintly mother.

And so it goes.

This certainly is not a definitive “Carmen” on the ancient, still valid, terms of the composer and his librettists. It doesn’t pretend to be.

It is, however, a brilliant, daring, illuminating reexamination of a masterpiece. It is a compelling attempt to make vital modern sense of what often emerges, in lazier hands, as a hand-me-down charade.

Pintilie takes nothing for granted. Even when he directs against the music, he stimulates the mind and engages the eye. Many a faithful, “authentic” reproduction of the opera does far less.

Although Kees Bakels conducted with equal vigor and sensitivity on Monday, the brash, swiftly paced Vancouver version proved more memorable for sight than for sound. The carefully selected cast acted marvelously, sang only acceptably.

In the irrational world of opera, one probably can’t have it both ways.