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On Saturday, October 17, 2026, LA Opera will celebrate its 40th birthday with a very special gala celebration following the opening night performance of Carmen.
Carmen is desirable, defiant, and driven. She thinks nothing of charming a soldier to escape a spot of trouble—never imagining that he would abandon his childhood sweetheart and desert his post to follow her. But Don José is a jealous lover, and as Carmen begins a new relationship with the bullfighter Escamillo, his passion turns dark—and deadly.
Bizet's masterpiece arrives onstage in a brand-new production drenched in Spanish Gothic splendor. Domingo Hindoyan opens his inaugural season as Music Director with one of the world's most iconic scores.
Composed by Georges Bizet
Running time: approximately 3 hours and 30 minutes, including one intermission
Sung in: French with English subtitles
New production. Co-production of LA Opera, Houston Grand Opera and Detroit Opera.
Synopsis by Thaddeus Strassberger
Setting: In and around Seville, suspended between centuries, where tradition is unyielding
Act I
The square outside Seville’s infamous cigarette factory, its walls scarred by weather and time. Soldiers lounge in the heat, watching the passersby with the boredom of men on guard duty as the people of Seville slowly go about their annual preparation for Holy Week celebrations. The children are restless as the unrelenting sun beats down upon them. Micaëla arrives searching for the corporal Don José, a countryman from their home village Navarre, and is told he will return with the changing of the guard. When José appears, the square fills with the factory women on their break. Among them, Carmen, who suddenly stands out from the crowd, drawing almost every eye towards her disarming allure.
Carmen fixes on José, the only man in the square who refuses to look at her. She tosses a flower at his feet before disappearing back inside the factory walls. This small, deliberate act of defiance against a man's indifference sets into motion the first crack in the wall he has built around himself. Micaëla returns with a letter and a kiss from José's mother, urging him toward the quiet, conventional love waiting for him at home. He is on the verge of resolving to marry her when a scream erupts from the factory: Carmen has slashed a fellow worker's face in a fight. Ordered to arrest her, José finds himself unable to resist the current pulling him toward her instead. Carmen slyly persuades him to release her, promising a rendezvous at Lillas Pastia's tavern if he lets her escape. He agrees and in that instant, he trades the life he knows for another, filled with freedom and danger.
Entr’acte:
Don José is sentenced to prison as punishment for his brazen act of institutional defiance.
Act II
Don José longs to be inside Lillas Pastia's tablao, where restless bodies and voices intertwine in primordial rhythms around the soldiers and smugglers who cross paths after dark. Carmen dances for an officer, then abruptly for no one but herself, when Escamillo, a celebrated bullfighter, strides in with an enthusiastic entourage of fans. His swagger draws Carmen's interest, but she holds him at a distance. She is waiting for José, freshly released from his imprisonment for letting her go.
When only Carmen, Frasquita and Mercédès remain, fellow smugglers Dancaïre and Remendado arrive and reveal their risky plans to transport some recently imported illicit goods. Frasquita and Mercédès are keen to help them, but Carmen refuses, since she wishes to wait for José. After the smugglers leave, José arrives. Carmen dances for him alone, until a bugle call summons him back to barracks. Torn, he almost leaves. Carmen, wounded and angered by his hesitation, unleashes her fury on his divided loyalties. His superior officer, Zuniga, arrives looking for Carmen himself, and José, provoked past reason, lashes out against him. There is no way back now: having attacked a superior officer, José decides he has no choice but to flee into the mountains with Carmen and the gang of smugglers, abandoning his uniform, his mother's blessing, and the last of his old self.
Intermission
Act III
A Roma cemetery on the outskirts of Seville. A gated “city of the dead” built up just outside the living one, sealed off from mainstream society and answering to its own laws and its own gods. Tombs and funerary niches crowd together like tenement houses. The smugglers have made this place their camp, and among the graves the line between mourning their ancestors and celebrating them blurs entirely. José's jealousy has curdled into something darker in this haunted, liminal place; Carmen, restless and unrepentant, no longer bothers to hide that his hold on her has already loosened. Among the tombstones, Carmen and her accomplices read the tarot cards to see into the future. The cards turn against Carmen herself, spelling out death with an unsettling clarity. Surrounded by the graves of those who came before her, she meets the omen without apparent fear.
The dangerous smuggling operation continues into the night. The smugglers depart to transport the merchandise across the rugged terrain, while the women cunningly distract the corrupt customs officers who stand in their way. José, now deeply embedded in the criminal enterprise, is left behind to guard the camp and remaining contraband.
Micaëla makes her way towards the cemetery gates, terrified but resolved to bring José home to his dying mother. The tombs around her are a grim omen of her dangerous mission. Escamillo, too, has followed Carmen's trail, and he and José come to blows over her among the graves before the smugglers return just in time to wrestle them apart. José finally agrees to leave with Micaëla, but not before swearing to Carmen, with the unsettlingly repressed violence of a man who has lost everything else, that this is not an ending.
Entr’acte:
Semana Santa has finally arrived, the first procession winding through the streets alongside the crowds pressing toward the arena. Penitents, devotional candles, and a gilded float move through the same square where the public eagerly awaits the bullfight to begin.
Act IV
Outside the bullring in Seville, the crowd gathers in a blaze of color and spectacle for the corrida. Escamillo’s attendants solemnly prepare him in his hotel room for his appearance. He then enters in triumph with Carmen on his arm, and the two share a final, unguarded moment before he disappears into the bullring to the roar of the crowd.
Carmen is warned that José is near, hiding in the shadows outside the arena. She refuses to run. Alone with Carmen at last, José begs her one final time to return to him; she refuses just as absolutely, casting off the ring he once gave her rather than surrender herself to him. As the crowd inside erupts in celebration of Escamillo's victory and the penitents outside continue their solemn procession, José kills her at the threshold between these two worlds. The sacred and the profane suddenly, and tragically, collide.
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Special Events
New to opera? With our Newcomer package, you get access to an exclusive pre-show talk to introduce you to the story and music and an intermission reception with wine and desserts for Carmen, Turandot and The Marriage of Figaro.
Book this 3-Opera Newcomer Package starting at $140 (including fees).
Join us one hour prior to showtime for a pre-show talk about the opera, an enormously popular highlight of the LA Opera experience. You'll learn about the history and plot of the opera, as well as key musical moments to look forward to.
Talks are free for ticketholders.
Photos & Videos
Show curtain (entr’acte before Act IV) for Carmen, by director/designer Thaddeus Strassberger.
Set design for the finale of Carmen, by director/designer Thaddeus Strassberger.
Set design for Act II of Carmen (Lillas Pastia's tavern at night), by director/designer Thaddeus Strassberger.
Rihab Chaieb (photo by Gaetz Photography)
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