Review: Angel Corella’s new ‘Carmen’ is a beautifully danced addition to Philadelphia Ballet’s repertoire

The femme fatale known as Carmen, based on Prosper Mérimée’s novella of the same name, has been captivating opera, dance, and film lovers for nearly 180 years.

There’s Matthew Bourne’s gender-bending dance piece The Car Man, the TV movie Carmen, a Hip-Hopera starring Beyoncé, Salvador Távora’s flamenco extravaganza featuring a drum-and-bugle corps plus a magnificent white horse, and many more.

At the Academy of Music, Philadelphia Ballet is currently celebrating the start of its new season, plus the company’s 60th anniversary, with a robust and exciting new production of Carmen, the first full-length ballet created by artistic director Angel Corella.

The story is simple enough, as told in Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera, which forms the basis for most modern Carmens. A nice-but-dull guy meets a beautiful-and-dangerous woman who seduces him into wrecking his career and taking up with her gang of criminals. But when Carmen leaves him for a more-glamorous man (spoiler alert!), both she and the nice guy end up dead.

In Corella’s version, this story has been streamlined and several secondary characters eliminated. But the principals remain: Carmen, who does whatever she likes, no matter the cost; the fatally suggestible Spanish army sergeant Don José; and Escamillo, the rock-star bullfighter who becomes Carmen’s next romantic conquest.

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Some of Corella’s artistic liberties, however, can be unsettling to audiences used to traditional productions. In this ballet the people José ends up killing may come as a surprise. Several sections of Bizet’s famous music, too, have been relocated. For example, “Habanera” accompanies Carmen’s seduction of Escamillo, not José.

An unusual and intriguing aspect of Corella’s ballet is its emphasis on Don José, with the production beginning and ending with a view of the disgraced officer, alone in his cell, awaiting execution.

On opening night on Thursday, the devastatingly handsome Arian Molina Soca played this role, excelling both technically and dramatically. In his bravura solos Molina Soca tossed off multiple leaps and turns with ease but his complete command of José's initial, anguished solo — all sharp edges and despair — was even more remarkable.

Nayara Lopes was an entirely believable Carmen, a testament to her acting ability as well as her rock-solid technique. The young dancer appears smiling in photographs and interviews but onstage, as Carmen, her authority as the coldhearted, manipulative temptress is clear.

Sterling Baca, identified as “General” in the cast list but as “lieutenant colonel” in the printed plot summary, was appropriately strong and impassive — before falling under Carmen’s spell; audience favorite Jack Thomas was noteworthy as Escamillo, and Yuka Iseda excelled in her brief role as Fernanda, the cigar-factory worker whom Carmen attacked, setting the plot in motion.

One of the most effective aspects of this ballet is the (uncredited) set design, by Corella. Movable walls suggest a variety of locations, enhanced by Nick Kolin’s dramatic lighting. Venues are further identified by large colorful projections on the rear wall of the stage: a lacy fan, a bull’s head, a cross.

As usual, the troupe’s music director and conductor, Beatrice Jona Affron, proved to be an inspirational leader; her interpolation of music from Bizet’s “L’Arlésienne” into the score was especially apt, and principal cellist Jennie Lorenzo excels in the so-called “flower song.”

This ballet demonstrates Corella’s choreographic strengths: inventing daring and seemingly impossible lifts and holds, ending individual scenes at emotional high points, inserting occasional notes of broad humor into the drama, and capitalizing on his dancers’ versatility. The once-stolid José matches Carmen’s sensuousness in their bedroom scene, and Molina Soca’s innate sense of fun adds greatly to the sequence in which a group of “Bandits” stands in a circle, challenging each other to ever-more-difficult acrobatic feats.

While preparing his new Carmen, Corella stressed the Spanish nature of this production. A Madrid native, he was trained in ballet plus all types of Spanish dance, including flamenco and the escuela bolera, a classical, balletic form performed with castanets. Alas, none of Philadelphia Ballet’s dancers actually played castanets; orchestral versions of the instrument were used, instead.

There were other Spanish touches too: The dancers held their elbows high and their feet (the women’s clad in pointe shoes) were sometimes used percussively. However, the dancers’ palmas (rhythmic clapping) and pitos (finger-snapping) were too soft to have much impact. Although Corella collected most of the costumes for this production during visits to Spain, there were a few sartorial missteps. In particular, the black lace catsuits worn in the Second Act by the women labeled tonadilleras seemed out of place.

I left the theater questioning two points in Corella’s Carmen.

At the end of Act 1, after José stabs one of his victims, Carmen stands in front of him with her back to the audience, removes José's uniform jacket, and throws it on the ground. To me, at least, her motivation was unclear: Was this because she knows he must flee, and the less he looks like a military man the safer he will be?

I also felt uneasy about the end of the Act 2, when José places Carmen’s lifeless body on the altar of the bullfighters’ chapel. Perhaps this was a purely practical decision, to allow for a quick scene-change back to José's cell. But the introduction of a specifically religious note, this late in the game, seemed strange.

Such quibbles aside, Corella’s new Carmen is a colorful, sexy, beautifully danced addition to Philadelphia Ballet’s repertoire. Performed with four rotating casts of dancers in the principal roles, it gives audiences a welcome chance to see how different artists, from a total of seven countries, approach these physically demanding and psychologically freighted parts.

Philadelphia Ballet’s “Carmen,” through Oct. 15 at the Academy of Music,. 240 S. Broad St., $25-239, 215-893-1999 or kimmmelculturalcampus.org.