Technical Team Leave Carmen Slightly Chaotic

Bizet’s Carmen stumbled its way to a 10.40pm curtain down at Bradford Alhambra last night, after what seemed like technical glitches which left audience members confused as to whether they should be enjoying an interval or waiting for a set change.

Forty five minutes in, with a slightly erratic lighting plot, the curtain went down and half the audience vacated the theatre, as bar staff hurriedly advised them that it was a five minute set change, only the 5 minutes became 20 and the set didn’t change! The ice cream ladies were sent for and the frustrated lady next to me left.

Bizet would have been turning in his grave considering that the original 1875 premier at Paris’ Opera-Comique Theatre, ended in its own fiasco with people walking out before the final curtain; three months later the great man was dead at just 36.

However, Ellen Kent productions have one thing in their favour, a handful of strong principals and, in this instance, the wonderful duo that was Natalia Matveeva (Carmen) and David Sumbladze (Don Jose), as the two main protagonists, lifted the show and quickly put any misgivings the audience may have had, firmly to the back of the stalls!

Soprano Matveeva was Bizet’s famous femme fatale, an operatic creation delivered by the 19th century composer after he took inspiration from Merimee’s famous 1845 novella.

She had a wonderful voice and the undoubted beauty and figure to carry off the part of a stunning, black-haired Spanish gypsy girl, who has a part time job as a man eater and a penchant for men in uniform!

And I really warmed to Corporal of Dragoons, Sumbladze, who falls for Carmen hook, line and sinker, to the point that he is obsessed and even prepared to kill her: ‘if I can’t have you, no-one else can’. Scroll forward and you can guess the ending of this famous tragedy.

He had a superb tenor voice and, with every passing scene, I was drawn into the musicality and believability of the duo, who really played well oppositve each other.

Iurie Gisca as the Toreador, Escamillo, was a man of fine voice but did have the look of a Mexican Elvis Presley impersonator, and Valeriu Cojocaru, who I have seen before, had an amazing bass voice but little agility these days as his passing years makes him less convincing as the Lieutenant of Dragoons, Zuniga.

Conductor of the Orchestra of the Ukrainian Opera and Ballet Theatre, Kyiv, Vasyl Vasylenko – desperately in need of a new programme photo – conducted with gusto and kept the momentum of the opera going in between scene lags.

With just one more of the Kent opera trio to go – La Traviata this afternoon – I again look forward to it but must first applaud the hard-working cast including Elena Dee who, just 24 hours earlier was Madama Butterfly (back briefly as village maiden Micaela), in the same way that Vitalii Cebotari was US consul Sharpless, back in Carmen as Corporal of the Dragoons Morales.

A hard-working troupe who give their all.