On Screen

...The problem, at least on this side of the Atlantic, is where...

...Jake Gardner, Escamillo at the performance I saw, also has a fine voice but is less at ease than the others when it comes to acting...

...Of course, music lovers will still enjoy Bizet's full score well-performed by a traditional orchestra submerged in its pit...

...Perhaps two years ago 1 was too carried away by the newness and captivating power of Brook's enterprise to perceive any flaws...

...The peeling walls, the missing bricks, the spectators seated on wooden benches, made the sand that filled the area once occupied by a stage appear to be a natural part of the building...

...Interviewed by a Paris literary weekly before the 1981 opening at theBouffes du Nord, Brook stated that his aim was "to try and retrieve theopera Bizet could have written if he could have been freed from the conventional requirements of his time...

...Brook found it unacceptable to have them buried in a pit, deprived of any contact with the singers except through the conductor, so he decided to put them up on view...

...The latest reopening, though, seems a harbinger of hope, for it is occasioned by the arrival from Paris of Peter Brook's La trage"die de Carmen...

...Bizet's conflicts with Charles Ponchard, the old-fashioned singer who staged his work at the Op&ra-Co-mique, are well known...

...Brook, who brought his cast with him from France, has kept several performers rotating in the roles of Carmen, Jose and Escamillo...

...When Jose finds out about the liaison, Zuiiige pays for his pleasure with his life...

...A less than assiduous opera-goer, I must have seen about 10 different productions of Bizet's classic...

...Instead, Escamillo's death seems to destroy her own will to live, and she kneels down to wait for Jose's stab in the back...

...Nonetheless, even if on my second viewing now in New York I have developed a number of reservations concerning the book, the musical arrangements and the direction, the show's stirring theatrical impact matches all save the most extraordinary productions of the nonoper-atic stage...

...The Carmen I saw, Helene Delavault, was magnificent, as was Howard Hensel in the part of Jose...

...It didn't strike me as a good idea...

...This changes the denouement, for Carmen no longer dies because she refuses to surrender her gypsy liberty to Jose's exclusive adoration...

...Brook and Carriere, by contrast, entangle him in the action by having him show up at Lillas Pastia's, ask for Carmen, and undress like an old, expected customer...

...Similarly, although the musicians of the Opera-Comique, along with Ponchard, were disconcerted by Bizet's unorthodox score, there is no indication that he modified it to please them or anyone else...

...Yet that being the case, one wonders how the director could also say that he has no complaints about the way the Vivian Beaumont stage was "reconstructed" for him...

...But Peter Brook's production should demonstrate to future producers of Carmen that this opera is meant for a vivacious ensemble of actor/singers, not for prima donnas...

...Did Esca-millo, at the Bouffes du Nord, sing his "Toreador Song" in the tavern/bordello owned by Lillas Pastia...

...Perhaps the colloquy was aided by the fact that Bizet was married to Halevy's cousin...

...There have been some unfortunate changes in the staging since Paris, but I'm not sure they are the problem...

...The decrepit Theatre des Bouffes du Nord, on the Boulevard de la Chapelle, a street dominated by an elevated metro line and sinister loiterers, was the ideal place for an austere, brutal, ultra-simplified retelling of the famous story of Carmen, Jose, Micaela, and Escamillo...

...Various producers subsequently tried to make use of the space in 1980 and '81, with little success...

...Meilhac/Halevy then allow the Lieutenant to disappear...

...not all the characters are quite adequately developed...

...This time around, I also felt severely disturbed when the musicians struck up "March of the Toreadors" before two stagehands were finished extinguishing the little fires that marked the mountain camp of the gypsies...

...Micaele, invented by Meilhac/Halevy for a touch of sweet innocence, here physically wrestles Carmen in the mountain dirt...

...Carriere has in addition retrieved Carmen's husband, Garcia, from Merimee, apparently for the sole purpose of giving Jose yet another person to kill...

...Nor did it help matters when Carmen and Escamillo finished the glorious number sitting stiffly side by side on two kitchen chairs-with nothing to suggest a corrida in the background except the single sword wrapped in a muleta that the stagehands placed behind the couple...

...Beverly Morgan sang Micaela stunningly...

...Besides the difference in theaters, I had the very unpleasant thought at Lincoln Center that La tragedie de Carmen is simply not as good the second time...

...When Katsulas enters carrying the carpets that will delimit the area of his inn, he turns to the public with a series of jokes in broken English, mimicking the expressions and intonations of a New York comedian...

...Also extensively documented are his negotiations with his librettists, Henri Meilhacand Ludo-vic Halevy, the most successful writers of operettas at a moment when that genre was the favorite in most Paris theaters...

...Having met Carmen in the tavern, he survives an attack by Jose only to be fatally gored in the ring...

...Jose remains believable, for he has not been altered from the Meilhac/Ha-levy version: He is the somber, violent loner who instantaneously becomes a toy in Carmen's hands...

...True, too, as adapted from Georges Bizet's 1875 Carmen, with additions to the score by Marius Constant and to the libretto by Jean-Claude Car-riere, La tragidie is still an opera...

...Carriere's tranforming Jose's commanding officer, Lieutenant Zuiiige, from an extremely minor character into a cold-blooded, double-crossing villain doesn't make much sense either...

...Brook has stressed that despite his tailoring the opera to the "radically different circumstances" prevailing more than a century later, he has not sought "to deny or fight Bizet's work but to do something parallel...

...Then there is the placement of the orchestra, 14 musicians carefully chosen and directed by Marius Constant, and no less perfect in New York than Paris...

...In New York the use of the prop seemed amplified to the point of monopolizing our attention...

...and the death and destruction they meet is less than entirely convincing...

...Meilhac and Halevy elevated him to a full-fledged matador...

...Did Carmen, in Paris, hold a cigar and make a big fuss with it while singing her unforgettable "Habanera...

...Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival took up residence there in 1973, opening with David Rabe's In the Boom Boom Room?the obscure story of a go-go girl plagued by Freudian problems-then vacated the premises in 1978...

...The orchestra disappears in the cavernous depths of what used to be upstage...

...Thirty-seven years of age, he passed away following the 37th performance of his masterwork...

...Although Brook lets him maintain that station and outfits him in lush regalia, his magnificence is sharply diminished by his sitting on that kitchen chair while the throngs in the ring are supposed to be acclaiming him...

...The episodes of the pared-down plot sometimes seem a bit disconnected and confusing...

...At the Beaumont, the geometrical configuration is exactly theopposite...

...But Jean-Claude Car-riere's idea of making Lillas Pastia her pimp is hardly in keeping with the spirit of the story...

...In the wide open, relatively shallow performing space of the Bouffes du Nord, the musicians could be positioned in a manner that maximized their participation in the action...

...In the standard version, Zuiiige arrests Carmen without showing the slightest personal interest in her, and punishes Jose for letting her escape...

...The absence of any musical hitch is proof of the miracles that can be effected through long, meticulous rehearsal...

...I tried to resist the temptation to compare, but I'm not sure I succeeded...

...Structural problems are apparent, too, with the hypnosis worn off...

...The critics attacked the "strangeness and incoherence" of Carmen's music as stridently as the "immorality" of its libretto...

...In Merimee's Carmen, incidentally, Escamillo is a mere picador, the lowest class of bullfighter...

...Likemanygreat artists, Bizet died young and vilified...

...With all that said-possibly a bit too strongly, because of the sudden awakening from my previously too complete fascination-la tragedie de Carmen is an event I would strongly recommend not missing...

...In fact, now that I see several, I wonder whether they merely escaped me before or are recent...

...Escamillo, triumphant at the end of the traditional text, suffers a very different fate under Brook...

...If I didn't much like Andreas Katsulas' caricature of Lillas Pastia, Brook is probably to blame for assigning him the task of providing the "comic relief...

...Indeed, Theatre National de I'Opira director Bernard Lefort-listed in the New York program as "Artistic Adviser"-commissioned the work in 1978, and his company is credited as co-producer with Brook's " International Center" at the ThiatredesBouffesduNord...

...True, the Beaumont was meant to be the province of dramatic, spoken theater, while the other four buildings of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts were to accommodateopera, ballet and concerts...

...If in the traditional opera the musicians turn their backs to the singers, here the singers almost always face away from the musicians...

...Brook's Carmen runs 80 minutes, and watching it one begins to wish the original full-sized one were not quite so ubiquitous...

...In any event, the composer apparently had the last word, bringing the initially lighthearted libretto closer to the harsh 1845 Prosper Mer-imee story that was its source...

...Brook further successfully reincorporates a twist from Merimee, depicting Carmen herself as not only a fiery gypsy, but a brazen, sensuous prostitute...

...In general, Brook's company-gathered from various nations, including the United States, trained in Paris and employing a uniformly excellent French -Is a superior one...

...At the Beaumont, where the stage has been extended and lowered to the level of two rows of pillows that precede the tiers of plush seats, thesand seems likean utterly out-of-place gimmick...

...Two high, gloomy walls, obviously intended to convey a feeling of doom, have been built on either side of the stage, hiding the wings and leaving a long, narrow corridor for the action...

...On Stage PETER BROOK'S CARMEN' BY LEO SAUVAGE Until a few weeks ago, the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center had been dark for two years, and it was not exactly a shining light for some time before that...

...If so, maybe I didn't particularly notice because the opera, after all, has something to do with women working in a cigar factory...