Denyce Graves as Carmen, Washington National Opera (photo by Karin Cooper)

This year’s production of Bizet’s Carmen (see the piano-vocal score) was a late addition to the company’s 2008-2009 season, reportedly displacing another production to a future season when its star, Denyce Graves, became available. The American mezzo-soprano, born here in Washington and an alumna of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, is a favorite with local audiences. For all of her struggles in recent years, personally and vocally, La Graves can still sell out a house, at least here in Washington. In fact, the opening night of this production felt somewhat like an opera gala, catering to the traditional tastes of audiences and the idiosyncratic whims of stars. Even the explanatory note in the program was not written by the director — the production is old and has nothing to say, anyway — but by Denyce Graves. The voice has lost none of its presence nor gained much in beauty, with an emphasis on the robust chest voice, which sounds forced from time to time. Her Carmen remains sexy, swaggering, headstrong, its dramatic scale tipped consistently toward emoting over subtlety.

Whether that is enough to make this recycled and rather humdrum production worthwhile depends on your tastes. Traditionalists and Graves fans will exult, others will take a pass. The pretty sets, designed by Allen Charles Klein, come from Austin Lyric Opera and look like just about every other staging of Carmen used over and over in regional opera companies, in fact, quite similar to the one from Virginia Opera reused just this summer by Summer Opera Theater. That it was basically the same set in each act, with a few bits and pieces changed, did not deter the enthusiastic audience from applauding most times that the curtain opened. The costumes, designed by Lennart Mörk, came from Washington’s 1995 production, leaving director David Gately only to place the singers on the stage and tell them where and how to move. Not much thought seemed to have gone into those decisions: for example, the chorus of the cigarette girls sauntered out of the factory and then basically sat and stood around singing.