Music: Carmen, but Not Bizet's

An opera about an opera in 82 minutes

The setting is a decrepit building in a seedy district of Paris, not far from the rumbles and whistles of the Gare du Nord. Its inside walls are crumbling. Its seats are long, hard wooden benches, and the stage is nothing more than a dirt floor. Yet this unprepossessing site is currently selling the hottest ticket in Paris: to Director Peter Brook's radical version of Carmen, Georges Bizet's classic opera of love and death in old Seville.

Like the theater in which it is playing, called...

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