From Spain to Little Saigon, a Vietnamese ‘Carmen’

Plastered on Little Saigon storefronts and bus stops is the face of Spain’s No. 1 femme fatale: Carmen.

Her name is on the lips of television and radio talk-show hosts and in the headlines of newspaper and magazine ads. Her image has even been painted on a truck the size of large U-Haul.

Caught up in the blitz, ticketholders are humming the famed “Habanera.”

“I’ve heard about it all over the radio, read it in the paper and my customers keep bringing it up,” said Tan Nguyen, 57, owner of an electronics store in Westminster.

Based on the classic tale and Georges Bizet’s opera, the show debuts Sunday with a 20-member all-Vietnamese cast at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center in Long Beach. It will be performed entirely in Vietnamese and organizers say this is the first time “Carmen” has been adapted for Vietnamese theater.

The $40,000 musical production is the most ambitious attempt by the 2-year-old community theater group Kich Doan Hai Ngoai (Vietnamese Drama Group of America).

The Orange County-based troupe, which has been performing in La Mirada, Long Beach and San Jose, is on a mission to broaden its repertoire by including more cultural crossover in plays and to strengthen the presence of Vietnamese theater in the community.

The seductive leading lady is played by Mai Phuong of Westminster, who will sing the signature aria “Habanera,” the only song lifted from Bizet’s opera--the rest of the score is new.

The role of Carmen is a welcome departure from the typically innocent, demure roles Mai Phuong plays in traditional Vietnamese theater.

“I’ve played a lot of sweet Vietnamese female characters who are always so sad, and they cry and cry,” the 36-year-old actress said in her native tongue.

Carmen is outgoing and free-spirited, and she cries only once in this adaptation.

“Vietnamese women’s roles have to be sweet, not spicy. Carmen is a spicy girl,” Mai Phuong said, with a saucy glance. “So I have to play Carmen a little bit softer and cuter, because we will have mothers, fathers, grandparents and children in the audience.

“But Carmen will still be sexy, with a lot of men around her, and hotheaded--still Carmen.”

As Carmen, Mai Phuong will trade her straight, obsidian hair for curly locks and her silky, traditional ao dai dress for ruffled skirts and Spanish gypsy blouses with a tad more, ahem, cleavage.

It’s no problem creating the sultry look: Mai Phuong balances her acting with her day job as the owner of a beauty salon in Westminster.

“Acting for a living is difficult here, so I keep my business to pay the bills,” she said.

She graduated from a four-year conservatory in Vietnam where she studied Shakespeare and took leading roles as Juliet, Desdemona and Ophelia. She also has played roles in more than 20 feature films.

A Vietnamese Brigitte Bardot, Mai Phuong starred in such popular movies as “Bien Bo” (Beach Shore), a romantic 1988 story of a woman who loves the beach more than the two men wooing her, and “Nu Chua Saigon” (Saigon’s Queen of Thieves), a 1987 story about a professional thief. On the stage in 1985, she starred in “Co Gai Ngoi Tren Goc Cay Gay” (A Young Lady Sitting on a Tree Stump), about a feisty young woman who rolls with the punches that life throws her.

She’s played a lot of parts, but this is one of her grandest. “This is the biggest drama show in our Vietnamese community,” she said. “I’ve seen Hollywood, but this is our own.”

Mai Phuong co-founded Kich Doan Hai Ngoai with the show’s producer, Quoc Thai Nguyen.

“We want to change a bit and bring a different taste in Vietnamese drama to the community here,” Nguyen said. “If you eat pho or banh cuon a lot, you may want a hamburger every now and then.”

Nguyen, 38, of Anaheim Hills, is a typical member of Kich Doan, which is made up of a core of a dozen professional entertainers. He juggles his love of theater with his day job. The owner of Saigon Radio, he hosts a popular talk show from 4 to 7 p.m. weekdays. (Saigon Radio reaches an estimated 200,000 listeners in Southern California and about 100,000 in San Jose.) He also moonlights as a musician at two nightclubs on weekends.

The second oldest of five, Nguyen comes from a musical family that fled Vietnam in 1975. Though mostly involved in the music industry, Nguyen said he saw a need for more professional Vietnamese theater.

“I want to help bring theater into the forefront as part of the whole entertainment experience for the Vietnamese community,” he said.

The classic story by Prosper Merimee was adapted by Ba Doan, Mai Phuong’s father, specifically for a Vietnamese audience. Doan, who lives in Mississauga, Ontario, is also directing the performance. He said creating the script was a challenge because Carmen’s role didn’t have any dialogue or action in the 1845 original.

“No one had made a play of [Merimee’s] work in Vietnamese yet. So I had to write the script to bring out Carmen’s character. I had to create the motives, inner and outer conflict, and action for each character to make the story more dramatic.”

Set in Spain, “Carmen” is a tale of passion, jealousy and fate. Carmen’s lover, Don Jose, declines from his stature as a military officer to a smuggler and murderer. Carmen, meanwhile, skirts in and out of trouble.

Characters such as Micaela (played by Ai Van) and Escamillo (played by Tuan Hung) are foils to Carmen and Don Jose (played by Vu Khanh) and are characters from Bizet’s opera rather than Merimee’s narrative. Doan added extra scenes, including fights and passages depicting the hardships of gypsies’ lives.

Mai Phuong said she really relates to the character of Carmen. “When she’s in love, it’s passionate, but when she’s angry, it’s venomous. She’s very intense. And she loves her freedom. That’s what’s most important for her. She’d rather die than to give up her freedom.”

Such a fatalistic notion of freedom strikes a nerve for more than 100,000 Vietnamese former immigrants in Orange County, many of whom escaped Communism.

Playwright Doan knows that with this audience, the themes of liberty expressed in the show will ring true.

“The gypsies are like the South Vietnamese,” Doan, 62, said. “They speak straight from the heart what they feel. They love to sing and dance. They don’t like to harm anyone. They are kind yet very proud. They only wish to live their life with freedom.”

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SHOW TIME

“Carmen,” a Vietnamese- language performance, Carpenter Performing Arts Center, Cal State Long Beach, 6200 Atherton St., Long Beach. Sunday, 7 p.m. $25 general. $50 VIP. (714) 839-8121.