When Gustavo Leone got the assignment to score Court Theatre’s adaptation of Prosper Merimee’s novella “Carmen,” he was mindful of inevitable comparisons with Georges Bizet’s classic.
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Newell approached James Robinson, an old hand at directing musical theater, about adapting Merimee’s novella, a lurid tale of lust, jealousy, and murder that’s recounted as if it were a scientific report by an archaeologist who’d traveled to Spain and become fascinated with its Gypsy subculture. “The archaeologist, as an outside observer, gives an intellectual narrative,” Robinson explains, “and nested within it is a series of emotional, confessional flashbacks from Don Jose, the love-struck soldier whose obsession with controlling the free-spirited Carmen ends in murder.”
Robinson made the double narrative “less linear and intentionally jagged,” then told Leone the music had to supply an emotional undercurrent as well as play with the expectations of an audience already familiar with the opera.
Leone also gave Carmen an exotic Gypsy number and gave the archaeologist a signature tune. “I quote Bizet here and there,” he adds with a smile, “and I wrote a habanera just in case people expect the famous one from the opera.”
