Big Fat Gypsy Opera

Opera Review CARMEN at London Coliseum



If you saw the header ‘Opera Review’ and thought ‘not for me’, stick with us for a moment. We’ve always thought Carmen was the crossover vehicle for people who don’t think they like opera: it has lots of recognisable songs, an easy-to-follow story and it’s a landmark piece of social propaganda since, although written in 1875 and set in testosterone-crazed Andalucia, it’s the central female character who dominates the macho men and makes all the decisions on which the plot pivots.

She’s a shoeless and footloose gypsy girl for whom the rules of attraction operate in reverse: come on to her and she’ll reject you, ignore her and she’s all over you like prickly heat on the Costa del Sol. She charms innocent soldier Don Jose into desertion and crime to earn her affection, but when she dumps him for a more glamorous bullfighter, he kills her in a fit of jealous rage.

Traditionally, Carmen is staged with a skipload of fringed shawls, lace mantillas, fans and roses in the teeth and we were excited to hear that ‘bad boy’ Catalan director Calixto Bielto had decided to ditch these clichés in favour of an update to the last days of General Franco, which well suits the lawlessness of Carmen’s gypsy band here seen as cross-border smugglers of alcohol, tobacco and white goods. Hints at organised crime and child prostitution give it a darker tinge, too.

The crowd control (cast of over 60) and staging are truly impressive, the military brutalism highlighted from the outset with a muscular squaddie in Y-fronts and boots pounding punishment laps, but we were slightly less captivated by the leads. On paper, mezzo Ruxandra Donose ought to be the ideal gypsy with her natural dark hair and Romanian colouring, but here she’s a rather forced blonde. She’s also pushing fifty which made her sexual machinations seem more calculating, and in the song where she and her mates tell fortunes with cards, heightened the tension of ‘who will I marry, and when’ so we warmed to the idea that this predatory feline is more cougar than panther.

Up-and-coming American tenor Adam Diegel also felt a bit underpowered as Don Jose but Carmen’s two sidekicks, played by Rhian Lois and Madeleine Shaw, were straight out of ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’ and delivered both strong characterisation and vocal energy. Star turn of the night, though, is undoubted Coliseum favourite Elizabeth Llewellyn, the glorious British Jamaican soprano whose superbly-sung Micaela, Jose’s childhood sweetheart from his home village, was transformational – upgrading her from timid peasant girl to another self-determining woman.  Llewellyn’s brilliance made you wish, for a moment, that sopranos could play Carmen.

The orchestra is tremendous, with sensitive, well-paced conducting by Ryan Wigglesworth, and hopefully this amazing staging will be in ENO’s repertoire for many years to come.


written for Londonist and published 22 November 2012

Has Carmen Lost the Plot?

PUBLICATION DATE 12 APRIL 2012
Written for londonist.com



We have been here before. Many times, it feels: ‘stripped-down’ pub opera featuring the concomitant apparatus of skinny jeans, transfer tattoos, funky tights, DMs, bad haircuts, jazz beards and studentish ensembles. With its garret-full of debris, vodka bottles, cellphones, laptops and fairy lights, Carmen at the King’s Head does not disappoint.

The chaise-longue on which the eponymous heroine is eventually throttled could as easily be Mimi’s deathbed and we are disappointingly not a creative bus ride away from Opera UpClose’s original staging of La Bohème at the Cock Tavern which sparked the whole thing off in the first place.

London is now saturated with railway-arch and pub opera, and desperate for more of the originality which inspired the pioneering productions: at least this weekend’s opening of Don Giovanni in a gay bar under Charing Cross has promise of gender-bending and a recognisable baritone in the lead.

Critics agree the drama has been pared to the bone, but lost some rationality in the transfer to its North London crime-squat setting, as well as the fire and passion of Seville’s gypsy band. Rupert Christensen in the Telegraph gave it four stars, though, enjoying its “rough-edged vitality, mostly well-acted, crisply directed and inventively designed” in contrast to Kieron Quirke in the Evening Standard who thought it “short, and comically dreadful … a plotless try-hard mess”.

Ace opera bloggista Intermezzo picked on the “clunky English libretto, a bashed-up piano and an underutilised guitar” and we’d have to agree that you long for some orchestral support for the fabulous tunes in Bizet's lush and filmic score: although Elspeth Wilkes fairly hammered the pub piano into submission in a spirited accompaniment, Sam Johnson’s tentative guitar contributed little.

From a cheery start with the cast striking up the Habanera in the bar, the atmosphere’s charged with a convincing catfight and Carmen’s arrest by Don Jose but immediately deflated by a ten-minute wrangle to seat everyone inside the theatre itself.

Leads change nightly, but we enjoyed the chemistry between authentically Tufnell Park-born mezzo Flora McIntosh and East Sheen's hunky 'singing dentist' Andrew Bain as Jose, although he seemed to run out of both charisma and lung-power by the Flower Song climax.

Also, if you’re going to kill your girlfriend, hammering her face repeatedly into a canvas stage flat isn’t terribly efficient, as well as tension-breakingly laugh-out-loud funny.

Seville Partnership

PUBLICATION DATE 19 SEPTEMBER 2011
Written for londonist.com



At Londonist Towers, our fondness for Wilton’s – the last surviving ‘grand musical hall’ in the country – knows few bounds.  We love its raffish ‘beautiful state of disrepair’ auditorium, its varied repertoire and its super nice cheap bar.

The shabby chic auditorium is so adaptable and for this week’s performances of Carmen it could so easily have been a flamenco dancehall in early nineteenth century Seville.

It finds an ideal partner in soprano Kate Flowers’ dedicated Co-Opera Company.  Based in an unpromising industrial estate in Sydenham, like Wiltons it’s unsupported by any public funding but manages to offer intensive vocal training and workshops to promising singers through an inventive sponsporship scheme which anyone can join.

The singing is mostly excellent and the acoustic makes it all so clear and understandable – even for a Swedish Escamillo and Rumanian Carmen who emphasise the international scope of the company.  Some of the voices take time to warm up, but the ensemble pieces are as pleasurable as the arias with Tom Lowe, Catherine Rooney, Felicity Buckland and particularly Alex Duliba enriching their quartet of supporting roles with bravura performances, and Ian Beadle brilliantly and confidently doubling Zuniga and Morales.

This is a very ‘polite’ production: Carmen done by the West Wittering Young Conservatives, perhaps. Adriana Festeu looks and sounds more Samantha Cameron than a cigarette-factory spitfire, and despite his lovely and strongly sustained lyric tenor, Michael Scott is too scarily Boris Johnson to convince as headstrong soldier Don Jose.

It’s delightful to hear the voices supported by an excellent sixteen-piece orchestra but the acting lets the side down under William Relton’s awkward direction. It’s quite an achievement to mount Carmen with a cast of just nine, and they all work extremely hard, but  when you think how much more was delivered in the same space by the Union’s Iolanthe, it might do this company a service if they could hook up with some of London’s more imaginative fringe theatre directors to put a spark into the staging and characterisations.