An Uncommen Carmen

In honor of its twenty-fifth anniversary, the Boston Lyric Opera (BLO) decided to give the people of Boston a present: the production of Carmen on the Common. Over the past year, the BLO has spent over a million dollars on Carmen, and its employees have poured an equal amount of energy into the project. Some could imagine, however, that even the most resourceful of BLO employees were overwhelmed upon discovering that the Boston Common sprinklers had soaked all of the costumes the day of the dress rehearsal.

Despite this complication, the 60,000 people who turned out for the opera’s first performance on Friday were able to enjoy an entertaining reenactment of Bizet’s story of a beautiful gypsy girl whose carefree attitude towards love brings her death. Among the 75,000 Boston residents who attended Saturday night’s production, a larger proportion than is usual for operas were families with children or twentysomethings. The BLO had hoped to reach out to a younger audience by producing Carmen in English rather than its original French.

Additionally, they felt that the accessible storyline, prominence of the opera and well-known score added to its common appeal. The many children in the audience, who probably had participated in BLO’s Saturday Family Day, an “afternoon of crafts, performances, demonstrations and hands-on activities,” must have appreciated the English lyrics and been thrilled by the familiar, rousing music of composer Georges Bizet. However, other audience members may have wondered if the sexual overtones of the performance, as evidenced by Carmen’s blatant seduction of Don Jose and her salacious dancing, were quite appropriate for the children present. Still, the multiracial cast of Carmen on the Common may have inspired some of the younger audience members and certainly must have broken the older audience members’ stereotypical views of opera as soley a Caucasian art form.

Judging from the crowd and the applause, one may safely conclude that the Boston Lyric Opera’s outreach to the people of the greater Boston area was a definite success.