When director David Lefkowich and set designer Peter Harrison sat down last January to plan Anchorage Opera's production of "Carmen," they were handed a challenge.
"Usually it's in four acts set in four locations and each act requires a separate set," Lefkowich said. "We were asked, 'Is there any way we can do this with less? To get away from all the sets -- and the expense?'"
The team's solution was to use a single set suggesting a bullfighting arena for all four acts. "The whole thing is about this battle between two forces of nature," Lefkowich said -- the free-spirited gypsy title character and the murderous and conflicted soldier Don Jose.
Lefkowich took the idea a step further, incorporating bullfighting moves in the choreography.
What he didn't do was place the action in a different time period or attempt to reinterpret the characters and their motivations. This "Carmen" remains in 19th-century Spain. The opera is sufficient as is, he said. "If something's not broke, don't fix it. Let the performers and the music do their magic."
The cast is led by Audrey Babcock in the titular role, a veteran of some 30 productions of "Carmen." She keeps getting the job in no small part because she not only can sing the notes but because she looks like everyone's idea of the fictional fiery, dark-haired gypsy girl.
"She knows the whole score. She knows everyone else's part," said Brian DeMaris, the conductor. "When she's doing Carmen, she's living the character inside and out."
Also, she can dance, a decided plus in a show where the music is regularly driven by Spanish rhythms. Before Monday night's sitzprobe -- the session where singers are fine-tuned in a rehearsal at which they sit down, usually their first run-through with orchestra -- she was not sitting, but practicing the frantic flamenco steps by herself on the empty stage.
"I like to infuse opera with dance," said Lefkowich. "It needs to be in your body."
Particularly in "Carmen," DeMaris noted. "The Spanish dances keep it lively and vibrant. Even Carmen's arias are known by their dance titles. The Habanera. The Seguidilla."
Fighting for a niche
If the characters are not dancing, they're fighting, Lefkowich observed gleefully. "Every act has a fight. We even have a cat fight with the women. This cast really threw themselves into it. It's wonderful!"
Stage combat is among Lefkowich's specialties. His website shows a brawl from "Romeo et Juliette," a French opera version of the play by Charles Gounod, a contemporary of "Carmen's" creator, Georges Bizet. Knowing how to coach a credible fight scene is sort of what got him where he is today.
"I did a lot of Shakespeare in high school," he said, "and there was always a fight scene. When I went to study in Paris I got more involved in it. Then I got into opera. Every opera has a fight, but most of them aren't staged that well. There aren't a lot of people in a company who know much about stage combat. But I did. I could bring that to the table and found a niche."
He and DeMaris have a long history together. "We've been friends since way back," DeMaris said. The two worked with New York's Glimmerglass Opera in 2007 and have since been the principal creative team behind Mill City Summer Opera in Minnesota.
The Mill City shows have been a conspicuous success, selling out as soon as tickets become available for the six performances each summer. 2016 will be the fifth season. Previous presentations have included "Pagliacci," "Barber of Seville," "Tosca" and "Daughter of the Regiment."
Such crowd-pleasing standard repertoire pleases him, Lefkowich said. His facility in directing them has taken him from the Met to La Scala in various positions. Right after the Anchorage "Carmen" opens on Friday, Oct. 23, he'll be catching a plane to Madison, Wisconsin, for "La Boheme." Then he's booked for Birmingham, Alabama, and Montreal, Canada.
"The great thing about this job is it allows me to travel and somebody else pays for it," he said. "I'm very lucky. I know for at least two years ahead of time what I'm doing."
Lefkowich's enthusiasm for fight scenes keeps DeMaris on his toes. "You have to be sensitive as a conductor," he said. "You don't want performers to become so involved that they actually hit each other."
That's usually not a problem, he admitted. But an overly visceral performance can throw off a singer's pacing, which can throw off the next singer or the ensemble and lead to a musical mess.
Be that as it may, "There's an undercurrent of nastiness in 'Carmen,'" Lefkowich said. When he and Harrison began work, they were inspired by "gory" images by the artist Goya, who worked around the time that the real-life model for Carmen was born. "This is not your grandparents' 'Carmen,'" the director said.
Emotion and murder
For this production, Lefkowich has been particularly interested in heightening tensions in the plot wherever possible. The stage, for instance, is raked, "so that the emotion flows, pours out onto the audience."
The character of Micaela, the tender village sweetheart of Don Jose, is often portrayed as an innocent. But in this production, Lefkowich said, he wanted to make her strong yearning for Don Jose evident and was delighted with how Rebecca Heath was delivering the role. "You can feel the emotion coming off her," he said.
Dramaturgy aside, it's the music that has made "Carmen" one of the most popular operas in the world: the seductive "Habanera," the wild dance in the tavern, the Toreador's song, the festive crowd at the bullfight.
DeMaris said, "If I was alive to see the Opera-comique in its heyday," the Parisian house where "Carmen" premiered, "it would have looked like our contemporary musical theater." DeMaris' credentials include a lot of musicals along with standard opera.
"It's full of great tunes. It has the big opening number, a lot of dance, a busy chorus."
But most musicals don't end with a murder. DeMaris said that concerned the Opera-comique management when they realized what Bizet had written. "They were pretty worried about people bringing their families to it," he said. "Bizet added a couple of lighter numbers to deflect that."
But it remains a musical drama, not a musical comedy, and one of the most compact ever conceived. "It's a thick score, full of notes, but it goes by fast," DeMaris said.
And it's the drama that eventually draws people to this art form, sometimes against their own expectations. Lefkowich is such a person.
"My parents always went to the opera and they always made me go with them," he said. "I didn't like it. I had a huge negative impression to overcome. But I did. And now I love it.
"I tell people who say opera's not their thing that if I can be converted, anyone can be converted."
CARMEN will be presented by Anchorage Opera at 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, Oct. 23-24, and 4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 25, in the Discovery Theatre. Tickets are available at centertix.net.