Lakán's Carmen

THE PROJECT

Bizet's opera Carmen, with infectious melodies and a radical depiction of a woman's sexual freedom, has, since its premiere in Paris in 1875, sat at the very pinnacle of the most beloved, most performed and most adapted-for-screen operas in history.

Writer, librettist and arranger Lakán Angelo Ragaza has updated and reset Bizet's score to a queer, 1970s NYC setting, against the backdrop of a police raid on a gay bar. Carmen is a young gay male sex worker, Don Jose a closeted rookie cop, and Escamillo a brash political candidate in the spirit of Harvey Milk.

You can hear a demo of Carmen's Habanera here.

OUR GOAL

We are raising $20,000 to complete a sound recording of Lakan's Carmen's major music numbers.

"I want to show a reverence for Bizet's music," Lakán says. "Yet I wanted to have a sort of 'conversation' with the opera's creators." Bizet was only 36 when he died of a heart attack, days after Carmen's premiere. Within a few years after his death, Carmen became wildly popular, going on to have productions in the U.K., the U.S. and as far away as Australia. "The music is spellbinding, and Carmen seduces not just Don Jose, but the whole audience," Lakán says. "But also, the questions of sexual freedom and gender expectations resonate. Nearly all humans wrestle with these, whether we admit it or not."

These questions loom larger than ever, with the reversal of Roe v. Wade, legislative assaults on trans youth and the suppression of education in schools about sexual orientation and gender diversity.

"Carmen was shocking in its day," Lakán notes. "But why doesn't Carmen have more of a back story? Why is freedom so important to her that she's willing to die for it? And: what if Carmen was a guy?"

Lakán Angelo Ragaza has written on identity, music and culture for the New York Times, Vogue, Newsweek and other outlets. He is a former editorial director at Lambda Legal, a leading LGBTQ civil rights organization. A graduate of Columbia, he has training in the French language as well as music theory, and sung the roles of Morales the soldier and Dancairo the smuggler in independent stage productions of Carmen.

After completing the demo of Lakán's Carmen's major music numbers, the creators of Lakán's Carmen will seek partners and backing to develop Lakán's Carmen both as a stage production as well as a feature film, with a multiracial and gender-diverse cast, as well as choreography inspired by drag, voguing and ballroom.