A Cock and Bull Story
Acosta Danza's Carmen (Richmond Theatre)
I always laugh when I remember dear old Barry Cryer talking about taking his wife to see Pavarotti in concert: 'He doesn't like it when you join in, does he?'
I'm not a huge fan of opera. The acting is usually melodramatic at best, crap at worst. It goes on for hours (nearly four, the last time I saw Carmen). And they really DON'T like it when you sing along. So it's a tremendous relief that this production of Carmen isn't an opera at all. No difficult-to-follow French lyrics depicting Spanish cliches through the eyes of Georges Bizet. No, no! This is Carlos Acosta's vision, so the whole thing's set in Cuba and just had a salsafied version of the music. By happy coincidence, I was in Waterloo earlier in the day so was able to get myself in the mood by eating at Cubana, that wonderful restaurant decorated by loads and loads of chipped Madonnas alongside the photos of Che and Fidel.
As dance spectaculars on a Saturday night go, this put Strictly in the shade. They wouldn't have been able to do it before the watershed for a start: it was so erotic that I was reminded of Magic Mike, though this time both sexes were represented on stage. It was also very much a Carmen for the Netflix generation, combining knife crime (Adolescence), balletic fight scenes (the live action One Piece) and toxic masculinity (Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere).
The bull had a bigger part than usual, too...a very human bull - a minotaur? - acting as a kind of emcee, a Brechtian narrator, if you will, though there were no actual words spoken. It was all done with movement - no bullshit.
And the whole thing came in at a cool hour and forty-five minutes, which included a twenty minute interval. Sweet as a nut!