E-Mail This Article to a Friend Bizet bodies Carmen to heat up the ART BY IRIS FANGER

"Carmen is the most-produced opera ever," says Dominique Serrand, co-artistic director of the Minneapolis-based Theatre de la Jeune Lune, "and that would have been the first reason for me not to do it. But when I looked at the text in French, it was so beautiful. I love the language."

Serrand has become practically a partner at the American Repertory Theatre. His Carmen, which premiered in Minneapolis in 2003, will run there September 3 through October 8 (in French with English surtitles), on the heels of last June’s Amerika and the director’s Elliot Norton Award–winning 2004 staging of Molière’s The Miser.

Unlike full-flavored opera-house pageants, this chamber Carmen runs just over two hours. Serrand has made significant cuts in the number of performers and musicians, not to mention the score. Twin grand pianos stand in for a complete orchestra, sounding as if they were "dueling instruments for their percussive quality," the director says. But not to worry, Carmen’s "Habanera" and Escamillo’s "Toréador, en garde" remain intact.

Serrand has returned in spirit, he says, to the opera’s 1875 Paris world premiere, when the singers spoke the lines that connect the now-familiar arias and melodies rather than performing them as recitative. "Bizet based his opera on the novel by Prosper Mérimée. I added some lines from Mérimée, to explain the characters and add some color."

Carmen has been recast for its transfer to Cambridge, with local singers replacing some of the ensemble and ART regular Thomas Derrah taking over Serrand’s role of Zuniga. But Serrand’s core group of singer actors, trained in Jeune Lune’s signature style of emotion-drenched physicality, remain: Christina Baldwin as Carmen; her sister, Jennifer Baldwin Peden, as Micaela, who’s in love with Don José; Bradley Greenwald as Don José; and Bill Murray as Escamillo. "When I first started to look for opera singers," Serrand points out, "I realized that they often had very little experience with the stage. So I started working with a specific group of singers whom I trained in moving and acting. It’s still the same group." Serrand’s acolytes learned on their feet by presenting reduced versions of five Mozart operas before taking on Carmen.

Although a love triangle centers the action, Serrand believes Carmen is "about displacement on a simple emotional basis. Each of the characters is a foreigner: Carmen is a Gypsy; Don José is from the Basque country. I tried to make Carmen as human as possible, not the grand seductress. She wants to be a free woman in a society that doesn’t allow it, where she must work in a menial job. Micaela is an orphan desperately in love with Don José. At the end, she becomes a widow of the man she did not marry."

The American Repertory Theatre | Carmen | Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle St, Cambridge | September 3–October 8 | $12-$74 | 617.547.8300 or www.amrep.org