Carmen at Benjamin and Marian Schuster Performing Arts Center

Carmen’s seductive, she’s elusive, she’s a danger to your heart. And best of all, she’s irresistibly tuneful.

Poor Don José. Poised to marry Michaela, the hometown “good girl” whom his mother approves, he topples like a giant oak in a storm when the fiery gypsy sets her laser sights on the hapless corporal. Don José doesn’t give in without a struggle, and neither does pure-hearted Michaela, who dares to search for her love in the mountainous gypsy smugglers’ lair. But who can resist Carmen’s seductive Seguidilla or her inviting, tempestuous Habanera? Certainly not Don José, and definitely not the generations of audiences who have made Georges Bizet’s masterpiece one of the most frequently performed operas ever.

Alas, what Carmen boasts in allure and vocal splendor, she lacks in attention span, and Don José soon finds his once-comfortable world quickly imploding. He risks everything for the temperamental gypsy—his military career, his former sweetheart, even a chance to see his dying mother. And for what? Fleeting passion in the midst of a smuggling ring he was supposed to police. His doom is set when in swaggers his rival, the virile baritone Escamillo, a bullfighter. Well-equipped with the glamour of the bullring and the irresistible Toreador Song, Escamillo snatches the prize from the devastated tenor, Don José. Despite fateful warnings from a reading of the cards, Carmen never veers from her self-determined path to destruction. She must remain forever free! She will pay for her freedom with her life.