Going Out, September 2025
After three newsletters in a row where I went to see free shows at the open-air Jay Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park, it’s time to return to theaters. Fall is not quite in the air yet in Chicago, but it’s threatening to be, and so it’s time for a new season of concerts and performances in the traditional arts. On Friday, after leaving work I took a leisurely stroll, stopping for dinner along the way, to the Lyric Opera House to see the Joffrey Ballet’s performance of Carmen.
I’d been surprised by how cheaply I could attend. I paid almost double for a last-minute replacement shirt at Macy’s after having been clumsy with my breakfast that morning the amount I had for a balcony seat; although if and when I return to the Lyric, I may want to splurge for a closer view of the stage (or at least rent opera glasses, which I only noticed were available after the show). But even at about half a football field’s distance, I found the staging absorbing and the dancing frequently electric.
I should note that I’m little more than a layman when it comes to ballet or classical work in general; I’m familiar with the general outline of Bizet’s Carmen (though I only actually knew the “Habanera” and the “Toreador” from it), because I have been alive and paying intermittent attention to media for going on fifty years, but this is the first time I’ve really taken in any rendition of the material, and the second time in my life (I think) that I’ve seen a ballet, after a childhood field trip I have only the vaguest memories of. I’ve read more modernist novels about fading ballerinas than I’ve seen ballerinas in action.
Still, I’m not sorry that it took me until now to engage with any rendition of Prosper Mérimée’s novella, since I don’t know that a younger version of me would have fully been able to appreciate the conflicting nineteenth-century currents of antiziganism and philoziganism (not to mention French stereotyping of Spanish culture) that inform it at a fundamental level. Little of which is present in the ballet: presented wordlessly, in silent-movie mime and broad canvas strokes, it cuts Bizet’s Romantic excesses and byzantine plotting down to crisp, flavorful action, turning the opera’s specificity of time, place and ethnicity into a symbolic struggle between three historically persistent forces: power, money, and freedom. Only once money (Escamillo) has caged freedom (Carmen) can power (Don José) destroy it.
This adaptation dates only from 2015, when the late choreographer Liam Scarlett produced it for the Norwegian National Ballet; Scarlett died by suicide in 2021 after allegations of abusive sexual misconduct, and although he’s given auteur status in reviews of this production, the three women actually credited with the Joffrey’s staging are all ex-ballerinas, two of whom had worked under him, one British, one Spanish, and one American. But the Sun-Times’ review is broadly accurate in its reservations, I think, although I saw a different cast the following night.
And checking the reviews, I think both the Sun-Times’ assertion that it’s set in the Francoist 1930s (which Scarlett’s original 2015 production does seem to have been) and the Tribune’s assertion that it’s set during the 1820s resumption of Ferdinand VII’s absolutist rule (which fits the timeline of Mérimée’s novella) are incorrect: my assumption, just from the costuming and set design, was that it was set in the later nineteenth century and that the rebellious ¡Viva la República! sign in the first act was a reference to the First Republic, which ended the year before Bizet’s opera debuted. But my interior picture of Spain in the twentieth century has been honed by the urban Spanish modernism I’ve consumed; and Romanticism, which the Bizet score made this perforce, will always feel later ninteenth-century to me. Ultimately, the production’s history is as hazy as its ethnography: symbolism, not documentary accuracy, is what ballet does best.
In the production I saw, the Mexican Anais Bueno as Carmen and Brazilians Stefan Gonçalvez and Edson Barbosa as Don José and Escamillo, respectively, felt vivid and distinctly realized, lending the drama the kind of hyperbolic emotional floridity familiar to me from Latin American forms of expression like tango, ranchera, or telenovela. And I was fascinated by the way the large-company dances moved from free-form, rebellious, and communitarian in the first act to regimented and limited, exclusively orbiting around the celebrity of Escamillo, in the last. I don’t have the ballet background to describe what the individual dancers were doing, but I found the palpable differences in the choreography during Carmen’s several pas de deux with Don José and Escamillo as narratively compelling as any words could have been, the joy of their mutual high-level athleticism a direct translation for the giddiness of mutually excited passion, in several different degrees.
At least until the doomed final dance, staged more like horror than frenzied romance — the everyday horror of romance curdled into masculine possessiveness — and gradually intensifying Carmen’s desperation as she finds every avenue of escape closed off to her, struggling for her freedom until the very last moment. The decision to have the show end immediately with her murder and Don José’s stillborn triumph in owning her now lifeless body feels almost incomplete in a narrative sense, but in a way that points up the semi-mythological overtones of the whole production: it doesn’t really matter how the broader social context of the characters would respond, whether Escamillo would want to kill Don José in revenge, how Carmen’s one-time companions might grieve, whether the Army would bring its deserter to justice — the ballet is Carmen, and it must end when she does.
Once free of the slow-moving, chattering, dressed-up crowd spilling out of the Lyric, I walked to the Red Line in a thoughtful mood. The electric exaltation of dancers at the top of their profession moving in ways that almost no human beings can for almost three hours is well worth the shortcomings of narrative plausibility, thematic coherence, sexual politics, and ethnic appropriation inherent in any adaptation of Carmen. It’s the movement, the staging, the design, the vivid moments of connection, rejection, and force that will stay with me, while the core nineteenth-century theme — noble Castillian officer corrupted by desire for a bewitching criminal Romani girl — fades into mere background noise, another of the thousands of hazards that lie in wait when engaging with the European canon at all.
But beyond any of that, I’m excited to spend the rest of the fall finding out what else I can see, and where, and what I’ll make of any of it. As I burrow further into middle age, recognizing more and more the limitations of my experience and awareness, the traditional high arts are just as appealing to me as the traditional low ones, and maybe more so, although I still intend to experience as much variety as my budget will allow. Until next time.