In the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “Carmen,” three pickup trucks and a tractor-trailer are crucial props.
Aigul Akhmetshina, center, on a tractor-trailer in “Carmen” at the Metropolitan Opera.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
By James Barron
Jan. 8, 2024, 5:00 a.m. ET
Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll find out what drives the trucks on the stage in “Carmen” at the Metropolitan Opera. We’ll also get details on subway service on the 1, 2 and 3 lines after the derailment last week on the Upper West Side.
Three pickup trucks and a tractor-trailer ride across the stage in the Metropolitan Opera’s new modern-dress production of “Carmen.”
They are not traditional opera props — tables, chairs, chalices, swords, maybe a horse for “Aida” — and don’t look under any of the hoods. Their engines have been taken out. You wouldn’t want the cast and the chorus smelling exhaust fumes backstage as the trucks and a little red sports car wait to drive out from the wings.
When they do, their wheels are spinning as the cast sings and dances in the semi and in the pickups — a 1980 Chevrolet, a 1978 Chevy and a Ford that Gabrielle Heerschap, the Met’s associate technical director, said “might be from the ’90s.” The little red car is a Jaguar, for Don José, whose obsession with Carmen becomes murderous.
The Met has had vehicles on its stage before, in recent versions of “Lucia di Lammermoor” and “Rigoletto,” among others. But those vehicles mostly stayed in fixed positions. Michael Levine, the set designer of “Carmen,” wanted the vehicles to move and said he had “naïvely” assumed they could be outfitted with small electric engines for their trips back and forth across the stage.
Instead, the Met opted to drive them with a computer-controlled system of wires — unseen, under the stage. The vehicles in “Carmen” are connected to the wires by posts known in Met stage terminology as “knives.”
So the rubber never meets the stage in “Carmen.” The tires on the tractor-trailer are not even made of rubber. The ones on the pickup trucks are, but they are filled with foam, not air, and do not spin. The hubcaps do, because they have been separated from the tires.
Not only were the trucks supposed to move, but they were to carry cast members — a dozen or so in the back of each pickup. “This is a ton of weight,” Heerschap said.
She meant that literally, give or take a hundred pounds or so. “We didn’t know for sure if we could fit that many people until we tried it onstage,” Levine said.
For the semi, there is one cab and two trailers. The cab and one trailer are upright in one act. Later, after a scene change, the cab and the other trailer are seen lying on their sides. According to Heerschap, it takes stagehands about five minutes when the curtain is down to move the upright trailer offstage, uncouple it from the cab, flip the cab onto the floor and position it in front of the second trailer.
Both trailers were made in the Met’s workshop. Carpenters put a curtain on one side and footlights on the floor in the upright one.
“It’s like a little stage unto itself, its own little vaudeville stage,” complete with a secret door and a hidden staircase, Levine said. The dancers who are in the trailer at the beginning of one act need a way out when choristers arrive to take their places.
As for the pickup trucks, he wanted a weatherworn appearance. “I wanted them all to have a slightly vintage quality, so they looked like trucks that had been on the road for a long time,” Levine said. “Older and more bashed up.”
A prop shop did the opposite of the usual auto body magic. Also on Levine’s orders, the pickups were given two-tone paint jobs.
“I wanted a certain level of roughness but also a little warmth” in the color scheme, he said. “I wanted to feel like these were trucks you might see in a rougher, deserty place. I wanted a feeling.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/08/nyre ... rucks.html