Cultural Voice of North Carolina | February 9, 2025
CHARLOTTE, NC – “Prends garde à toi!” You better watch out when la Carmencita gazes at you lovingly. The queen of Seville’s cigarette girls proclaims this insolent challenge – to the men she slinks past in the town square and a detachment of lascivious soldiers lazing on guard duty – almost as soon as we see her in Bizet’s Carmen. Differences between her and Micaëla, Corporal Don José’s fiancée, are artfully shown to go much deeper than city-girl brunette and country-girl blonde. When the drooling men in uniform offer their hospitality to Micaëla while she awaits Don José’s arrival, the chaste damsel skitters away in distress, promising to return later. Carmen quickly proves to be much different: shameless, seductive, and fearless, a wicked brew of beauty, passion, playfulness, and gypsy flair.
And yet we’ve still haven’t seen all the colors and facets of her portrait – or realized the full depths of what we’ve already seen in the eleven French scenes of Act 1. Alyson Cambridge, striking in appearance and lithe as ever in her movement, satisfied almost instantly at Belk Theater on opening night in reprising her Opera Carolina triumph of 2019, igniting and seething sooner as she built to the frenzy of the “Chanson Bohème” (“Les triangles des sistres tintaient”) that torches the opening of Act 2. Cambridge is as much the temptress now as she was in 2016 when she took on a title role in the special 40th Anniversary production of Porgy and Bess at Spoleto Festival USA. If anything, she’s more brazen and confident than she was as Tosca late in 2022, when she also seemed to be saving her strength for the more tempestuous final acts.
Certainly, stage director Dennis Robinson, Jr. deserves some of the credit for this higher-voltage Carmen, but so does the contrast so vividly framed by soprano Melinda Whittington as the sweetheart Micaëla, quaintly relaying a kiss to Don José from his dear ailing mother back home. Each of Whittington’s plaintive arias in the first three acts is a gem, wafting an anthemic lyricism from Micaëla’s native countryside over the stage and threatening to steal Carmen’s thunder. Cambridge must respond! Yet the new dimension for me came from the men who capture Carmen’s flitting fancy, tenor Jonny Kaufman as Don José and baritone Daniel Scofield as Escamillo, the dashing bullfighter.
No disrespect to tenors Ramón Vargas and the charismatic Roberto Alagna, both extremely capable vocalists that I’ve seen at the Metropolitan Opera as José, but neither was a hulking or intimidating presence. With or without his pearly smile, Kaufman does stand out among his fellow dragoons. Discarding the smiling ease of his welcome to Micaëla for the torments of love and passion that Carmen arouses, Kaufman is already anguished by the end of Act 1, two months before the deeper agonies of Act 2. Between this José and this Carmen we saw a battle between fidelity and wanton caprice. That’s what we expect from Bizet’s masterwork, and it escalated through Act 4 when Carmen’s fatal presentiments were fulfilled...
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