Holy toreador hotpants, Batman

Carmen was tonight. It was lovely. Don't know how much it added to the canon of Carmen productions, though I wouldn't be shocked if it's the first time Escamillo was wearing RayBans. And Carmen's tits (or rather Larissa Kostiuk's, the broody lady in the picture) were definitely for the ages. I mean they were like those super balls you get in vending machines.

I always get upset at the end of that opera. Not just because José kills Carmen for nothing worse than her having loved him for awhile and then stopping because he was a jealous whiney stupid boring clingy mamma's boy baby. Also that was totally not the right time for Carmen to die. You know, she's finally found some nice slutty bullfighter who's really just like her. It's not going to be happy ever after, because it never is, but at least you can imagine them spending the next thirty or forty years throwing things at each other in fits of passion and then making up, which is probably all a chick like Carmen really wants. And then her jealous whiney stupid boring clingy mamma's boy baby ex-boyfriend comes along, has the temerity to offer himself as an alternative, and kills her when she doesn't go for it. It makes my blood boil.

Yes, Jess, shut up now, it's just an opera. Except it isn't - an opera is never just an opera. We don't need to suspend our disbelief during an opera; disbelief stops meaning anything when we hear a crazy beautiful soaring or crashing voice capture the essence of a three second moment and spin it out for minutes, spin it out so beautifully we never want it to stop even if it's heart-breaking. If the final encounter between Don José and Carmen really happened it would take about 40 seconds, be gone forever, and nobody but those closest to the criminal and the victim would really wonder what the inside of these people's heads were like during those brief seconds when it went down. But opera doesn't let us, and then the beautiful explorations of the moment echo in our head.