Bitter Bizet Dominique Serrand’s dark Carmen BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

In act two of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, Corporal Don José has just been released from prison after allowing the fiery Gypsy cigarette-factory worker Carmen to avoid arrest for slicing up one of her co-workers in a brawl. He joins Carmen at her hangout outside Seville and their lovemaking is interrupted by two events: the bugle call summoning the soldiers back to camp, and the appearance of José’s captain, Zuniga, who’s also after Carmen. At first, José insists that he must leave, and Carmen lavishes her sarcasm on him. But when José discovers a rival, they fight, and as a result he can’t go back. Carmen turns her irony on Zuniga. "Bel officier," she sings, "love has played you a dirty trick." Now José will have to stay with Carmen and join the band of smugglers she’s working with on the mountain passes.

In Dominique Serrand’s Theatre de la Jeune Lune adaptation, which he worked out with his three leading cast members and is now playing at the American Repertory Theatre (through October 8) after first being staged two years ago in Minneapolis, José kills Zuniga (the ART’s Thomas Derrah, looking like Erich von Stroheim) in their fight, and Carmen, the remarkable Christina Baldwin, here sings "Bel officier" to a dead body. The irony is meaner, more bitter than in Bizet. It’s not as funny. Not funny at all. And this nasty Brechtian darkness broods over this fascinating and uneven production. When José hears the bugles and wants to leave, even lying supine on a rug with Carmen straddling him in a lubricious version of a lap dance, Carmen has already fallen out of love with him, disgusted by his sense of bourgeois propriety. The freedom she sings about, a celebration of her criminal life in the mountains, is something José is trapped into accepting. He’s not free at all, and truth to tell, neither is she. No one is happy. They’re all angry (even the chorus keeps shooting dirty looks at the audience) and all doomed.

Baldwin is an erotic, powerful, vivid, explosive presence — she casts by far the largest of lighting designer Marcus Dilliard’s shadows against the gray unit-set façade (factory, prison, mountain pass, bull ring) at the back of the stage. She’s a commanding singer who can move like a dancer. As José, Bradley Greenwald — who also did this two-piano reduction, using most of Bizet’s music — is a light baritone in a heavy tenor role (his program note says that only one scene has been transposed down, but the soft timbre of his voice undercuts the more vibrant ring and strain of a real tenor); his performance emphasizes José’s downhearted haplessness from the very beginning. It’s not exactly Bizet, but it works — best of all when José, practically swimming in his dark overcoat, turns into a wounded bull stalking Carmen in the murder scene. (I’m not sure whether to praise or censure Serrand for not making the bullfighting metaphor more explicit in this scene.)

Serrand’s postmodernized production (Micaela wears a backpack; someone in the chorus wears sunglasses; you can hear a car motor) actually looks back to the original version of Carmen, as performed at Paris’s Opéra Comique in 1875. (Leonard Bernstein was instrumental in reviving this version.) It uses spoken dialogue (in French) between musical numbers (not the more familiar grand-opera recitative added later), some of which must go back to Prosper Mérimée’s novella. (The coarser language here surely couldn’t have been said aloud on a 19th-century public stage.) We learn things we don’t know from the opera: Don José studied to be a priest; Micaela is an orphan. But Serrand is also his own worst enemy. He should be congratulated for not filling the stage with relentless busy-ness (a major fault of so many contemporary productions), but in his atmospheric moodiness, he allows the pace of the dialogue to drag. He lingers and expands where Peter Brook’s famous production condensed and intensified.

And some of his ideas are so off-the-wall, they undermine some of his best moments. He starts Carmen’s famous Card Scene with beautiful simplicity. Carmen’s friends, Frasquita (Momoko Tanno) and Mercedes (Corissa White), are reading their cards on either side of her. Who, they ask the cards, will betray them? Who will be their next lovers? The music is charmingly trivial. Baldwin’s back is to the audience, but she’s centerstage, and the center of attention. Then she turns around and reads her own fatal cards. Death — over and over. There’s no escape. Why then does Serrand have Micaela (Jennifer Baldwin Peden), José’s village girlfriend, crawl out from the woodwork and start turning over Carmen’s cards? This self-conscious theater shtick (it’s not the only one) ruins the powerful simplicity. Micaela again appears out of nowhere in front of the last-act bullring and helps Carmen after José stabs her. What’s she doing there?

Peden, a waiflike and pixyish blonde, is unusually effective conveying Micaela’s terror when she comes up the mountain (barefoot!) looking for José. But she’s asked to do these other things that just don’t make sense. There are also good if broad performances by Justin Madel and Kelvin Chan as menacing yet comic smugglers. The only cast member who’s not up to his role is baritone Bill Murray as Escamillo: his thin body lacks the curves of muscle you expect from a matador and his thin voice enfeebles the famous Toreador Song. Other quiet passages in the score, especially well sung by the men’s chorus, work well in a small theater, but this is one aria that needs to project. And when he appears at the end, topless, his bare chest awash in blood, the Baroque image is almost more silly than shocking. Just as the shooting of José by a police officer, after José has murdered Carmen, seems gratuitous, another gimmicky distraction rather than a revelatory gesture.

The elegant pianists are Barbara Brooks and Kathy Kraulik, though it’s really too bad there couldn’t at least have been a small orchestra — there’s so much color in Bizet’s marvelous and memorable score, one hates to lose it. I can’t say I much liked Sonya Berlovitz’s gaudy costumes. But I liked the color scheme: tenebrous reds and oranges against a somber gray and brown background — certainly a major contribution to the mood.

So we get pianos instead of an orchestra; a baritone instead of a tenor; a septet of smugglers instead of a quintet; irritating supertitles that appear a few words at a time; and Bizet’s name spelled wrong in the program ("Bizer"!). We get a director who might be too infatuated with his own desire to be different. And except for the leading role, a good deal of the singing would not be admired in an opera house. I missed the playfulness of Bizet’s lighter moments. And the cue pick-ups probably should be tightened a notch. Still, for all the drawbacks of this Carmen, it’s compelling to see a production grapple with a work that deserves its popularity but has become cliché-ridden and isn’t taken as seriously as it should be. I can’t remember Christina Baldwin putting her hands on her hips even once!