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| Playwright Norman Allen had to get in touch with his inner melodramatist to write the script for the new musical "Carmen: Viva Amor!" You won't catch this "Carmen," very loosely based on the seductress of Prosper Merimee's 1846 novella and Bizet's opera, on Broadway or in a Washington theater. You'd have to go to Prague, where it is having its world-premiere run -- in Czech, with English surtitles -- at the Karlin Theatre. Allen was introduced to Broadway composer Frank Wildhorn ("Jekyll & Hyde," "The Civil War," "Dracula") a few years ago by Signature Theatre's Eric Schaeffer. They agreed they should collaborate on the right project one day. That turned out to be a commission Wildhorn received from the Karlin (where his "Jekyll & Hyde" had a long run) to do a contemporary take on the "Carmen" story. "It was never going to be a period piece," Allen says; Wildhorn "envisioned a sort of Gypsy Kings, salsa, sexy score." After many permutations during a three-year process, the story has been transferred to a modern, unnamed Latin country. Carmen performs with a traveling circus (complete with caged lions); Jose is a policeman who abandons his fiancee for her. As the book writer (Jack Murphy wrote the lyrics to Wildhorn's music), Allen's job was to come up with the structure of the show. He created outlines, "then I wrote the script, including monologues where I thought songs should go. Then Frank and Jack took the monologue and put a song [there]," he says. |