Bizet, Cuba, Chicago, Oscar Hammerstein, London’s Festival Hall… a few worlds met last night at the first night of Carmen Jones. This new production of the hybrid musical came courtesy of Liverpudlian director Jude Kelly, artistic big chief at the revamped Royal Festival Hall.
Ever since the re-opening a month or so ago, the whole of London’s South Bank has been buzzing and last night, the first balmy evening for what seems an eternity, hedonistic hordes descended on the vast new terrace-bar overlooking the Thames. Drink to sink. In tandem with the sharply updated 1950s interior, a string of new bars and restaurants have sprung up underneath, behind, above and around the iconic concert hall. This was previously sorely lacking, propelling ravenous post-show audiences into the dark wastes of Waterloo in search of half-way decent sustenance. At the best you found a pizza. Now there’s a fantastic choice (for me, Las Iguanas chimed particularly well with the Mexican food I’m currently writing about).
But back inside the concert hall, facing the stage, we were in a curious half-way world between the Havana set (though no one was quite sure about this) with strung out laundry, peeling facades and a rusty car (which should have been a Cadillac but wasn’t - it looked more like a Vauxhall Viva). The dressed-down London Philarmonic Orchestra and the all-black cast (hailing from all over) seemed to have a ball, and a few solos sent the audience into raptures, notably the American, Sherry Boone (playing the spurned Cindy Lou) who suddenly produced an extraordinarily poignant aria of despair.
Carmen herself was memorably played by a devastatingly sultry and sexy Tsakane Valentine Maswanganyi, originally from Soweto. In tight scarlet dress, she stalked and prowled the stage, panther-like, tossing her head and looking suitably disdainful of poor Joe, the love-struck suitor played by Andrew Clarke, a true South London boy with a big voice.
Plenty of joyful chorus-lines brought Bizet’s ultra-familiar music to life, though for me, a travel writer, the idea of a trip “by train” from Cuba to Chicago was just not on. Why hadn’t they changed that line to suit the new Caribbean setting? It niggled. And why Cuba instead of the Deep South? And what period was it supposed to be? In operatic terms they made it, and the audience loved it. But Cuba-on-Thames? Or what exactly?