OPERA REVIEW : Wild New Carmen for San Diego : A routine revival with a tempestuous <i> and </i> seductive protagonist, who delivers the goods--sometimes going over the top.

Another “Carmen.” Another Carmen.

Gypsy pipsies come and go in Bizet’s ever-popular hum-along opera. They usually come with hand on hip and rose in teeth. Some are tempestuous, some are seductive. A few are both and many--alas--are neither.

Adria Firestone, the little-known American mezzo-soprano who womanned the castanets and the exotic bodice language for the San Diego Opera on Saturday, is both. Emphatically tempestuous and aggressively seductive, she doesn’t need the stock akimbo stance or the florid dental decoration.

This woman gobbles up the stage, with a hungry, calculated vengeance. She may not be the most disciplined, the most refined or the most mellifluous Carmen in memory, and she certainly isn’t the subtlest. But it hardly matters. Dark, lithe and attractive, she delivers the goods--up to and sometimes over the top.

This Carmen’s initial leitmotif is obvious: gotta dance, dance, dance.

She kicks up a Spanish typhoon, first barefoot and later in elegant heels. She musters a good flamenco imitation at the drop of a shawl. She dances even when Bizet gives her no obvious excuse to do so.

That’s just the beginning. She flashes lots of naked leg and actually manages to pick up her skirt with her teeth at Seguidilla time. Her eyes sear and her chest heaves. She slides and slithers with boundless abandon, flirts shamelessly with every man in the chorus, exudes wholesome Hollywood--or is it Broadway?--eroticism. She thinks nothing of lazing on her back when the supine spirit moves her, and the reclining posture never impedes her singing.

How good is the singing? It’s a bit mushy here, a bit shaky there, yet it always serves a keen expressive point. Her tone is generous, her range of nuances colorful, her dynamic scale broad.

Firestone isn’t a particularly nice Carmen. Stealing a bystander’s watch during the Habanera reveals a certain character weakness. She swills booze from the bottle and, in a fit of dubiously motivated pique, attempts to stab poor Jose in the back during a confrontation on what used to pass for a mountain pass.

Her repertory of histrionic devices tends toward the self-conscious. Although her colleagues in the cigarette factory keep their clothes on, she strips to her underwear at the steamy workplace. As tragedy beckons, she resorts to stagey stances. Still, she exudes magnetism throughout.

She has been specializing in this complex role for a dozen years now, mostly in minor American houses. What she would seem to need at this career juncture is a director who can focus her natural strengths and tone down her stagey excesses, not to mention a conductor who can reinforce the musical motivation for her dramatic compulsion.

The director at the Civic Theatre was Rosalind Elias. Herself an appealing and intelligent Carmen not that long ago, she moves traffic efficiently on the cluttered stage and keeps everyone very busy (often with fussy bits of extraneous action). Unfortunately, she offers little interpretive inspiration. Her most startling innovation may have involved the anachronism of a 1990s thumbs-up signal as signed the 1820s smugglers when they encourage Carmen’s entrapment of the hero.

Elias’ best efforts were hampered by John Conklin’s clumsy, literal, quasi-unit set (designed for San Diego) and by Peter J. Hall’s grab-bag costumes (borrowed from Dallas). The production, which dates back to 1984, definitely had a hand-me-down look.

Kees Bakels, a Dutchman remembered for his leadership of a bizarre postmodern “Carmen” in Vancouver, conducted here like a man in a great hurry. While one admired his spirit, one had to regret the toll it took on lyric expansion, on coordination between stage and pit, and on the singers’ ability to articulate the French text. Even more regrettable, perhaps, was his willingness to utilize Guiraud’s corrupt, time-dishonored recitatives.

Although Firestone dominated the proceedings, as every reasonable Carmen must, San Diego surrounded her with appreciative colleagues.

Arthur Davies, the British tenor seen in “Tosca” with Opera Pacific earlier this season, introduced a sympathetic, incisive, slender-toned Don Jose. Uncommonly conscientious, he even made a valiant--though not altogether successful--attempt to meet Bizet’s demand for a pianissimo B-flat at the crest of the Flower Song.

Ai-Lan Zhu, Peter Sellars’ erstwhile Zerlina, was the bland and pretty Micaela. (Has anyone ever encountered a Micaela who wasn’t bland and pretty?) Richard Paul Fink roared with sufficient fervor to bring down the house after Escamillo’s Toreador Song. He encountered disastrous pitch problems, however, when he reprised the hit tune offstage, and his mock-macho characterization was predicated on silly mock-matador poses.

Mark S. Doss offered a sonorous, swaggering Zuniga, Richard Byrne a suave Morales. Jeralyn Refeld played Frasquita as if she were a beguiling ersatz Carmen. Her Gypsy cohorts--Gale Fuller, Matthew Carey and Dennis McNeil--faded into the quaint canvas rockwork.