This is another of my experiments in alternatively focused reviewing, concentrating on individual performers, venues, and other parts of wholes. Here, I zoom in on a member of the corps of the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center who doesn’t sing a note but makes a major contribution to a current production.
In the program to the Metropolitan Opera’s Carmen, we learn a few sentences into the synopsis that “a fight erupts between Carmen and another woman at the factory.” From that throwaway line springs a memorable character. Carmen’s adversary is unnamed, but I know, because I follow the artist who plays her on Instagram, that she is called Manuelita. She enters first among the other female workers, her stride direct and strong, coiffed to be noticed, and made up a little more too. She’s meant to stand out, but she hangs to the side early on, behind the chain link, smokes, and looks on; she is fuming. When she talks to the other women, it’s not fake stage talk; there’s som’thin’ goin’ on w’ Manuelita. And it’s about Carmen.
Opera, invented by the Florentine academies of the Renaissance to restore the grandeur of Greek tragedy, has evolved to be even grander; the opera house is one of the few theatrical spaces in which crowd scenes are both expected and routine. They aren’t made up just of singers in the chorus, but actors and dancers too, who might enact a set piece or do something that drives the plot. In this time of “reimagined” classics, they portray the human reality of the world to which the original has been transported. In this Carmen, the women roll ammunition rather than cigarettes and the drama culminates at a rodeo near the U.S.-Mexican border rather than in a bullring in Seville.
It is due to a couple of artists whose work I know outside of opera that I became intensely aware of the Met actors and dancers and their contributions. One of those is a contemporary dancer and choreographer of great strength who also sings and writes songs that cross the threshold to the sublime. On top of that, Alison Clancy plays Manuelita.
It’s hard to imagine anyone more in touch with her physical being, possessing such muscular confidence or surety in her limbs, and she’s as good an actor as she is a dancer. I’ve seen Clancy as Manuelita with two different Carmens. She bears the face of one injured in love. The first time I saw her, in the previous season, she threw an accusatory glance over her shoulder at Carmen that has never left me, so well it captured an emotion we have all felt (or seen) at some bitter moment. We see a lot of Manuelita; she gets into spats, gets pushed from the factory in a physical fight with another woman, takes drags on her signature cigarette, a reminder of the tobacco factory in Bizet’s and Mérimée’s original story.
When whatever is simmering between Manuelita and Carmen reaches a boil, Manuelita on one side, her rival on the other, the space between them electric, her whole being, bodily and mentally, is in a fury; she would cross the stage to her, but she’s made to sit, forced down if she rises, pulled back if she takes a step. Finally, she shoves her way past the guard who blocks her, the authority of her rage greater than that of his uniform, and, in one of the most convincing physical tussles I have seen on stage, attacks Carmen, only to lose the struggle and be thrown violently to the ground. It’s a scene so striking that it makes one of the Met’s promotional videos for the production, excerpted here:
As the first act ends, we see Manuelita running off with the others in their rose pink jumpsuits. Clancy is back in later acts but it’s ambiguous whether she is still Manuelita or some other figure; we’re not at the ammo factory any longer. Yet, she still draws on the orange-glowing cigarette that was Manuelita’s signature (fire and flame are a motif of the production) with a knowing cynicism, and even if she is no longer Manuelita, she carries an awareness of her, like the intimation of a past life. Or is she, in fact, a chastened Manuelita, wiser than her former self? Does she look on as one who knows too well the fickleness of Carmen, who is, after all, the female Don Juan, condemned for her sexuality and assertion of self at all costs?
There’s a good deal to say about this Carmen as a whole and the two Carmens, Isabel Leonard and Aigul Ahkmetshina. Leonard is especially well-cast. The shift in time and place is lively and touches on contemporary issues, although something’s lost when Carmen’s murder by a man isn’t tied to the sacrificial ritual of the bullfight. It’s overall a rousing, all-in production that can be read about elsewhere. I’ve turned here to the vast uncredited dramatis personae whose names are nowhere on the program or Met website, that I can see, and yet are vital to the created world of the opera.
Of that, Clancy as Manuelita is proof. If elevating her to a full review seems odd, consider Eric Bentley’s notion of “major achievements in minor genres” or his description of Eugene Scribe as “the greatest non-genius” in the world drama; or Kenneth Tynan’s parsings of “good bad plays,” “bad good plays,” and the like, the pièce de résistance being “the great bad play.” “There are,” it is famously said, “no small parts, only small actors.” Manuelita is a major minor role, and Alison Clancy is great in it.
Carmen continues at the Metropolitan Opera through November and again in January, with Alison Clancy as Manuelita, dates at the link.