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10 The Politics of Color in Oscar Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones melinda boyd I first met “Miss Jones” (Carmen Jones, that is), a few years ago when I was searching for a suitable video of Bizet’s Carmen for my opera history class, and it immediately struck me as a work that begged to be examined through the lens of feminist and cultural theory. Susan McClary, Catherine Clément, and many others have shown (with respect to operatic subjects like Carmen) that scholars need to ask who creates representations of whom, with what imagery, and toward what ends. For example, on stage and on film, Carmen Jones must be considered a box-office hit.1 The Broadway stage version of Carmen Jones enjoyed an original New York run of 502 performances and numerous tours and revivals, and was adapted for film by Otto Preminger in 1954 (a feint for mass accessibility that has continued with the film’s rerelease on DVD).2 Yet the work sits uneasily on the margins of musical theater. Since it was adapted from opera, it necessarily bears the cultural baggage of another time, place, and genre. Moreover, as neither Bizet nor Hammerstein were ethnographers, Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones is about as authentic a representation of African American culture as Bizet’s Carmen was of Spanish culture—that is to say, not very. Oscar Hammerstein II may have been striving for a sensitive translation of the libretto, but his lyrics adopt common clichés of Negro speech. This oversight contributes to noxious stereotypes of the racial Other that are heightened by the residue of vicarious exoticism in Bizet’s score. At the time, critics raved that Hammerstein rejuvenated Bizet’s opera by providing lyrics that not only captured the subtleties of the plot and nuances of characterization, but often surpassed the original in both respects. Until James Baldwin’s scathing commentary on the film was published in 1954, few seemed to notice that Hammerstein equated Bizet’s sexually liberated gypsy with a lower-class African American woman.3 In the following discussion, I will peel away the various layers of representation in the stage and film versions of Carmen Jones. I will begin by examining the circumstances, precedents, and models that inspired Hammerstein’s conception of the work. Next, I will look at Hammerstein’s transformation of the plot and his text-translation practice, and examine how these factors are by-products of an opera history aesthetic best described as “anti-operatic.” Along the way, I will investigate the critical reception of Carmen Jones in light of the socioeconomic status and race of the work’s 1943audience. Finally, I will turn to Otto Preminger’s 1954film version, described by Baldwin as “one of the first and most explicit—and far and away the most self-conscious—weddings of sex and color which Hollywood has yet turned out,” and show how Preminger’s film brought the story of Carmen to a new and broader audience.4 Hammerstein’s dream of liberating opera from the elitist confines of the opera house was finally and completely realized, immortalized in CinemaScope for future generations. Background, Precedents, and Models Carmen Jones was not the first Broadway show to have an all-black cast, nor was it the first instance of an opera to be transplanted onto the Broadway stage. Hammerstein had already set a racial precedent collaborating with Jerome Kern on the smash hit Show Boat in 1927, but even Show Boat’s integrated cast was hardly a new phenomenon: as early as 1904 there were multiracial cast productions , notably ἀ e Southerners. Yet as Frank Rich has argued, “without Show Boat, there would have been no Porgy and Bess, no Oklahoma!, no West Side Story.” What made Show Boat different, according to John Graziano, was that “instead of the caricatures that populated most black musicals of the Harlem Renaissance, Hammerstein offered a serious and sympathetic portrayal of African Americans.” Show Boat provided Hammerstein with a template for depicting “the black experience ,” even though the black characters were minimally developed and black roles were performed by white actors in blackface. Still, the work was not without controversy in terms of its racial stereotypes. When Paul Robeson played the minor role of Joe in a 1928 London production, the European correspondent for the New York Amsterdam News criticized Robeson’s onstage character as “simply another instance of the ‘lazy, good-natured, lolling darky’ stereotype.” A 1993revival of the musical in Toronto elicited an...

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