Irene Roberts (Carmen) and Brian Jagde (Don José) | Credit: Cory Weaver While somewhat slow to take shape in its opening acts, this is a raw, emotionally confrontational Carmen, insisting that the audience look straight into the eye of passion’s pitiless storm. In its stark and disturbing final act, which begins with an alarming throng of frenzied bullfight fans storming to the front of the stage, the final scene between the proud and reckless title character and her spurned lover Don José pulses with an almost frightening charge. Restaged by Joan Anton Rechi, the double-cast San Francisco production (through July 3) is a harrowing triumph. First mounted in 1999, this widely traveled Carmen is making an auspicious U.S. But what counts here, in what is by reputation one of his more straightforward outings, is not auteurist stuntsmanship but the deeply riven arc of love’s power to destroy that Bieito carves through Bizet’s masterwork. Such are the sort of emphatic marks the controversy-magnet Catalan director Calixto Bieito can leave on a production. The act ends with something just as startling - a violent scenic coup that made the Friday, May 27, opening-night audience take in a collective breath, as if they feared for their own safety. Just after intermission, as the gripping final acts of San Francisco Opera’s Carmen get underway at the War Memorial Opera House, a dancer (Marcos Vedovetto) saunters onstage, strips bare and exults in his nudity, pausing to slap his own buttocks as he wanders about in the nighttime mountain air. San Francisco Opera's Carmen | Credit: Cory Weaver
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