MORE ABOUT LAKÁN'S CARMEN

I'm a creative polymath, which can be both a blessing and a curse! By day I've worked editing jobs at both magazines and nonprofits. I've also been a freelance writer, mostly on arts and culture, centering the experiences of LGBTQ people as well as people of color. I've worked as a creative director and photographer. And I have music theory training, although I can't play any instruments! I love music, Ravel, Poulenc, and Debussy as much as Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, SZA, and Beyoncé.

Although I've published as Angelo Ragaza and that's the name on my birth certificate, I wanted to work artistically under a name which reflected my heritage. Thus Lakán, which is a sort of pre-Magellan honorific in the islands that came to be called the Philippines. And I love Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake. His stamp on the story is so strong, he took ownership along with Tchaikovsky. So I'm calling this Lakán's Carmen.

While disassociating on my mom's couch with coffee on holiday break! I love opera in general, and French opera in particular. I'm mad for Massenet—Esclarmonde is probably my favorite opera. I'm also a big fan of the French language, literature, and film. In addition to majoring in French, early in my career I worked in two French-speaking workplaces and lived for several months in Paris. So I can scrape by in the language. In addition, I sang in the chorus of a small, scrappy stage production of Carmen. So I am familiar with Meilhac and Halévy's lyrics, and Bizet's devilish way with accidentals!

I am also fascinated with the opera's creation. When Carmen premiered at the Opéra Comique in 1875, Bizet was convinced it was a catastrophic dud. He died of a heart attack just weeks after the premiere, at the age of 36! But in the blink of an eye, the opera became a massive hit. Tickets for Carmen sold out in the U.K. and as far afield as the U.S. and Australia. Now, it's one of the most frequently performed operas, and one of very few operas known outside opera's core audiences. Broadway and Hollywood have both had their ways with it, with Rita Hayworth, Dorothy Dandridge and Beyoncé all taking their turns embodying Bizet's mythic femme fatale.

It's easy to see why. That music! Bizet spikes one infectious hook after another into your brain, and they stick there. And who doesn't want to be, or tangle with, a person who brooks no fools as far as her personal and sexual freedom are concerned?

But I was always struck by Carmen's lack of back story. We know nothing about her childhood, or her family. She seems to exist solely to seduce and provoke Don José and wreck his life. I thought, what if Carmen was a guy, and gay? What if he had a back story, and an actual character arc? And could a cisgender male voice work with Carmen's low-lying tessitura, which rarely goes to the top of the stave?

Thus began a months-long search for singers who were willing to undertake this admittedly batshit experiment with me. People's associations with Carmen, and with opera in general, are so strong, it's hard to think about Moralès, for instance, being sung by a cisgender woman, or Mercédes being sung by a countertenor or trans singer. It got to the point where I tested singers vocalizing "ah" vowels on isolated pitches and phrase fragments, deliberately not telling them what the source material was. Once I revealed the source, I had singers flat out tell me the experiment wasn't for them. So I had to look beyond the community of classically trained singers. And that turned out to be a blessing.

Slowly, painstakingly, I developed the idea that a lot of this music could be convincingly sung by different genders and gender identities. I lucked out finding Drew Morgan to workshop the role of Carmen for me. I literally found him googling "recent music theater graduates NYC." When he came in to pick through the Habanera with me, he hadn't heard of Carmen and didn't know any of the music. But the instant he opened his mouth to sing, my jaw was on the floor. Hearing his instinctive feel for the emotions and sensations I was attempting to evoke with the new lyrics, there was no need to audition anyone else. I took it as a sign from the universe that perhaps this experiment wasn't wildly misguided. And as you can hear from our demo of the Habanera, pop voices and sounds in English can sound quite luscious next to classical ones in French.

I want eventually to develop Lakán's Carmen as a feature film and as a stage production. I've completed a draft of the entire screenplay/book. I've produced a demo of the Habanera, and am in the process of producing another of the smugglers' Act 3 chorus "Quant au douanier," repurposed as a dementedly cheerful, ex-gay ministry rally song.

I'd like to eventually produce demos of more of the tracks, and perhaps even of the entire work as an audio or podcast feature, which the film could then be shot and sync'd to. I do think it could be done as a stage production, but I worry about the (necessarily) expensive tickets and the access challenges that creates.

So currently, I'm raising money to complete the sound demo of the entire opera. I'm actually reluctant to call it an opera, although I'm trying as much as possible to preserve Bizet's keys, harmonic progressions and tempi. I have deep reverence and awe for his sense of invention, harmonics, and stage drama. I just want to develop his characters further! And I want new audiences not to be phased by the word "opera."

First I'll say, if you haven't experienced Bizet's melodies, or allowed yourself to be seduced by Carmen, or listened to one of many immortal incarnations of her, you haven't lived. My go-tos on record are Tatiana Troyanos and Jessye Norman. Onstage, Denyce Graves simply floored me.

But also, Carmen is about freedom. We're living in a time in the U.S. where last-gaspers are chipping away at the rights of women, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color in very deliberate and systematic ways. So while I love the '70s as a decade, particularly its music and film, it was still a precarious time for many, a time of liberation and setbacks. Roe v. Wade wasn't a given. Anita Bryant was conducting her despicable crusade against legal protections for gay people, couching her animus as "protecting children," giving license to transphobic and homophobic violence across the nation.

Are we going back to that time?

Carmen demands absolute freedom. In the original opera, she dies for it. None of us should have to die to be ourselves.

Lakán's Carmen is a fiscally sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. So donations are tax-deductible. We will also be creating a store with Lakán's Carmen merchandise. Folks can sign up for email updates. And if there are individuals or organizations out there interested in partnering financially to bring Lakán's Carmen to life, please email me!