“Carmen” sets a new box office record for Vancouver Opera

by Mike Usinger on March 12th, 2024 at 2:33 PM

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Proving the classics remain more powerful than ever, Vancouver Opera has just set a record with the closing show for its 2023/24 season.

Georges Bizet’s Carmen is now the fastest-selling production in the history of the company. The good news is Vancouver Opera is staging five performances of the 1875 heavy hitter, which means tickets for select performances are still available.

This season’s production of Carmen—Vancouver Opera’s first mounting of the work in 10 years—will see Rachel Peake direct, with Leslie Dala at the conductor’s podium. Starring as Carmen are Sarah Mesko and Carolyn Sproule, with Alok Kumar and Matthew White splitting duties as Don José.

Shows will take place April 27 and 28, and May 2, 4, and 5 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

While the music remains true to Bizet’s original, the setting has been reimagined. Instead of taking place in late-1800s Southern Spain, Vancouver Opera’s Carmen is set in an unnamed Pan-Latin city in the 1950s. The backdrop will include peeling billboards, chaotic town squares, dive cafes, and costumes ranging from gold-gilded bullfighting finery to working-peasant’s denim.

The story has naive working-class soldier Don José competing for the love of Carmen, a gypsy for whom he throws over his childhood sweetheart and abandons the military. When Carmen instead declares her love for a flashy bullfighter named Escamillo, José murders him out of jealousy.

By offering previously unexplored depictions of proletarian life, immorality, and disregard for the law, Bizet’s work was considered groundbreaking for French opera when it debuted. Carmen has since become one of the most frequently performed, and loved, operas in the world.