Michieletto's Carmen Returns to Covent Garden, and London Says It Blazes

Damiano Michieletto's Carmen has returned to the Royal Opera House, and the Guardian's critic found the revival in strong voice. Reviewing the production on 30 October, the paper called Ginger Costa-Jackson 'an elemental and powerful Carmen' and a 'smouldering heroine'. The staging is the Italian director's own, first seen in 2024 and now back at Covent Garden.

The Guardian notes that Michieletto sets the drama in Franco's Spain. That is a working decision rather than a decoration: Carmen is usually placed in nineteenth-century Seville, among cigarette-factory women, deserters, smugglers and a bullfighter waiting in the wings. Move the action into a dictatorship and the chorus, the civil guard and the bandits all change meaning. On the review's account, the evening sustains the move.

A staging revived within two seasons is a staging the house trusts. Revivals are the ordinary economy of opera, cheaper than a new production and judged on whether the original idea still stands with a different set of voices in front of it. The Guardian's headline, which places the credit with its heroine, suggests this one does.