Putting the Samba in Opera.

• Author: Steif, William

"SAMBOPERA" is the name Augusto Boal has attached to his Brazilianized version of classic operas. He transformed Bizet's Carmen into a sambopera that ran for nearly four months in the Banco do Brazil's two-hundred-seat Cultural Center theater, and now he's working on Verdi's La Traviata, with Rossini's Barber of Seville and Mozart's Marriage of Figaro next in line. These and other classics will, he hopes, become part of the repertoire of what he calls "a permanent sambopera group."

Boal, sixty-eight, is Brazil's best known theatrical director, a gray-haired dynamo who spent fifteen years in exile after being tortured, jailed, and then banished by the Brazilian military dictators who ruled from 1964 to 1985.

The sambopera is a combination of the classics and the modern--the samba, of course, some other Brazilian musical styles, and a bit of Argentine tango tossed in for good measure.

On stage there's virtually no scenery for Carmen, just four chairs, an arch at one side, a small pedestal at the opposite side, and the four musicians in a corner at the stage's right rear. The four play piano, percussion instruments, contrabass, guitar, and cavaquinho, a sort of ukulele normally used in samba. Bizet's music is there, to a 2/4 beat, and the whole show takes exactly two hours and one minute. There are no intermissions, despite the fact that Bizet's original opera had four intermissions.

"We take out all that's not essential to development of the characters," says Boal. "There's some surgery on the music when it prepares too much for solos. The audience never knows this. The music is all familiar."

The Carmen characters are modernized. No toreadors, just soldiers who turn into soccer players. Carmen herself is no longer simply a flirt, she's a prostitute. One character's added, Micaela's mother, often referred to in the original but never seen. In Boal's version she appears, played by Cecilia Boal, his actress-wife of thirty-three years. And in this version there are killings.

But no opera singers. Boal says he wanted "good actors who could sing well"--and they do, but not like trained opera stars.

Boal and Celso Branco translated the script into Portuguese and adapted it. Marcos Leite arranged and directed the music, and Boars nephew, Luiz Boal, produced this Carmen...