January Is Experimental-Theatre Month

At 6:30 P.M., on Dec. 31—an earlier than usual starting time, to insure that the show will end well before midnight—the Met will début a new production of Bizet’s “Carmen.” The opera, which is now nearly a hundred and forty-nine years old, is not a new sensation, but its star, the prodigious young mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina, who made her Met début just last year, in “Rigoletto,” brings a fresh, ferocious energy to the stage. In 2018, at just twenty-one years old, Akhmetshina became the youngest singer ever to take on the title role of “Carmen” in a performance at London’s Royal Opera House. At twenty-seven, she will be the youngest singer to step into the role in a new production on the Met stage. The opera also marks the Met début of the director Carrie Cracknell, a British phenom whose spare productions of Greek tragedies such as “Electra” and “Medea,” at the Young Vic and the National Theatre, respectively, have earned her a reputation as a deft and sensitive interpreter of complicated women’s stories. It will be exciting to see what she does with “Carmen,” about a man who becomes so obsessed with a beautiful but cunning woman that he turns to violence in order to control her; the story is far overdue for a feminist reimagining. Even if you end up having other New Year’s plans—or if the cheap seats sell out—Cracknell’s “Carmen” will run through Jan. 27, with a second run beginning on April 25 (though if you want to hear Akhmetshina sing “Habanera” you must go before her final performance, on Jan. 27). Here’s to clean slates and high notes.SpotlightThe Theatre