OPERA IN ORANGE COUNTY : ‘CARMEN’ GETS LOST IN CIVIL WAR

Times change. Especially in the wondrous and irrational world of opera.

When the New York City Opera last appeared in Southern California, during the dark and distant December of 1982, the company held forth at the Music Center in beautiful downtown Los Angeles.

Now, for the next two weeks at least, Beverly Sills’ brave and not-so-little operatic band is calling the Orange County Performing Arts Center its Western home away from home.

When last we saw the NYCO edition of Bizet’s almost indestructible “Carmen,” it was a shabby but not unreasonable facsimile of the familiar saga concerning a tempestuous Gypsy girl who works in a cigarette factory and breaks assembled hearts in picture-post-card Seville.

Now, dear, old, romantic “Carmen” has gotten grimy and mod. The opera has become trendily significant. It has been updated, partially rewritten, drastically refocused. For better or worse--probably worse--it has undergone the Frank Corsaro treatment.

The “new” opera takes place in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War. Carmen is no ordinary vamp obsessed with tracing the unruly path of the flighty bird she calls love. The lady now is an obsessive Loyalist rebel who uses her wiles to get at the munitions guarded by a dumb but susceptible Fascist soldier named Jose. Get it?

Later, she uses similar wiles to ensnare a popular matador named Escamillo. He happens to be an alcoholic pushover who also happens to be an influential Franco sympathizer. Get it?

There is a lot of noisy, anti-musical shooting in this bleak and gratuitously violent “Carmen.” There also is a lot of gimmickry.

The erstwhile-innocent urchins who mimic the soldiers are now a pack of Fascistic mini-sadists who poke at conveniently located prisoners with toy sticks. Carmen escapes at the end of the first act in a hijacked truck, amid a deafening volley of gunfire. For no apparent reason, she sings her quasi-love duet with Escamillo on a microphone-bedecked platform, Evita style.

And so it goes.

There is nothing wrong--far from it!--with a fresh look at a deja-vu masterpiece. Periodic rethinking can be healthy, stimulating, provocative, so long as the dynamics and expressive impulses of the original are respected. Corsaro, unfortunately, invents and imposes subtexts that are unsupported or, worse, contradicted by the score and the libretto.

By giving his anti-heroine unsuspected sociopolitical motives, he makes nonsense of her avowed personal philosophies and destroys her fatalistic, potentially tragic, strength. By interpolating mayhem rejected by the composer--the brutal murder of Zuniga, for instance--he makes the characters unsympathetic and, worse, directs against the music.

By ending the opera with an irrelevant bullring massacre of the Fascists, he diverts attention from the presumed central theme, rapes his dramatic source and makes “Carmen” a clumsy opera about war instead of a poignant one about love.

The pervasively drab theatrical milieu is reinforced by the semi-abstract semi-unit set designed by Franco Colavecchia: low-tech props surrounded by all-purpose curtains painted to resemble granite. The thrift-shop costumes of Michaele Hite further accentuate the dreary, intentionally, no doubt.

It is possible that the basic Corsaro perversions might have enjoyed some bleak dramatic urgency when this production was new in 1984. That, alas, was many performances and many casts ago.

The ensemble that enacted the awkward charades Tuesday night at the Costa Mesa opening proved dutiful rather than inspired.

In place of the promised Victoria Vergara, the title role was performed--that is the right verb--by Susanne Marsee. She is pretty, bright, eminently conscientious. She does all the tough and vulgar things Corsaro wants. She strikes gutsy poses. She pretends stoically that the Habanera is an aria about peeling oranges. She commands a big, high and bright lyric mezzo, which she uses with suavity and grace.

Unfortunately, she lacks the sultry magnetism required in this elusive challenge. Some things can’t be taught, and the cold, tough, anti-amorous attitudes demanded by Corsaro only reinforce a sense of disorientation.

John Absalom plays Jose as a big, clumsy, bookish lug given to neatly choreographed fits of temper. Although his healthy, somewhat grainy tenor tends to slip in and out of focus, he sings with welcome ardor, and he musters sufficient finesse for a diminuendo on the climactic B-flat of the Flower Song.

Elizabeth Hynes makes Micaela a sweet-toned cipher. Robert McFarland blusters with nice baritonal fervor as the boozy bull-fighter. Robert Brubaker’s bright-voiced, gangsterish Morales dominates the otherwise solid but unremarkable supporting cast.

The musical coup de grace was fired Tuesday by Christopher Keene, who conducted with brisk, metronomic insensitivity. His orchestra, imported from Lincoln Center, sounded ragged.

It also sounded unusually loud, crisp and clear. With special acoustical reflectors installed above the proscenium arch, Segerstrom Hall made a most auspicious transformation on this occasion from concert hall to opera house.

One could argue that the sound was, if anything, too live and too treble-oriented for maximum comfort. Nevertheless, as encountered at the middle of the house, downstairs, the vocal and instrumental output enjoyed remarkable presence and vitality.

The fussy and sometimes inaccurate super titles projected above the proscenium arch were, once again, either distracting or illuminating-- depending on the viewer’s needs and aesthetic priorities. Count this viewer among the distracted.