The bullfighter Escamillo, with his knowing swagger, is in thrall to an alluring but limited concept of masculinity, while the ingenue Micaëla - even in a portrait refreshingly less simpering than some - is redolent of the chaste comforts of home. The title character is still using sexuality as a medium of exchange for personal freedom, and Don José, the soldier who falls under her erotic sway, is the same mass of psychic conflicts he’s always been.

Perhaps that’s because in essence, Bieito’s conception of “Carmen” is not much more probing or deeply thought-out than those of his more tradition-minded predecessors. The directorial flourishes sit atop the proceedings like raisins on a cake, imparting a little momentary flavor but never forging a thematic connection with the fundamental drama. Yet one searches in vain for an animating theatrical vision beneath these details, some sense of what Carmen’s story is meant to convey. (“I’m speechless,” one of them gasped, self-refutingly.)Īnd Bieito, to his credit, doesn’t shy away from the violence inherent in this work - not only the sexual struggles among the opera’s Gypsies, workers, smugglers and soldiers, but the political violence implicit in a military presence, which he underscores by placing the action in late 20th century Ceuta, one of the two autonomous Spanish cities in Northern Africa. There are several crotch clinches and a quickly simulated act of oral sex that even under cover of a parked car was enough to drive a pair of opening-night patrons from the house. There’s a fully naked man who strikes poses during the entr’acte while slapping his phenomenally sculpted abs, and plenty more beefcake of a limited sort.

Sure, this “Carmen” includes a handful of directorial strokes designed to startle the staid. This is one of Bieito’s signature creations, frequently revived over the past decade and a half, and although the external trappings of controversy are in place, nobody’s heart seems to be in it. The production of Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” that opened over the weekend at the War Memorial Opera House in a pair of performances with alternating casts is in fact a bland and dismayingly inert concoction at its core.

Carmen sf opera