LUSTY `CARMEN' WOOS VIEWERS.

LUSTY `CARMEN' WOOS VIEWERS LES GRANDS BALLETS CANADIENS DE MONTREAL THEATRE MAISONNEUVE, PLACE DES ARTS, MONTREAL, QUEBEC, OCTOBER 19-28, 2000

Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal's first three-act ballet, Carmen, has great mass appeal. There's plenty of sex, slapstick humor, cell phones, a rock star, wild and blurred videos of an escape from jail, cokesnorting cops, group rumbles borrowed from West Side Story and a glorious and graphic bedroom scene. Its anti-heroine is a fiercely independent packer in a cigarette factory.

Choreographed by Didy Veldman for Britain's Northern Ballet Theatre and retailored for Les Grands, this excellently staged Carmen marks the first time in its forty-two years that the Montreal company has tackled such weighty full-evening drama. Unfortunately, Carmen's choreography doesn't live up to its story and staging. Its group choreography flounders in repetition. Veldman, whose style owes more to modern dance than to ballet, has more success with duets, especially the splendid scene in the bedroom and the deliciously comical moment when the handcuffed Carmen entices a besotted policeman.

Set in a Brazilian factory town where familiar operatic characters such as the toreador and Don Jose appear as a rock musician and a lovesick cop, respectively, Carmen provides a dramatic challenge for Les Grands. Despite dusting off Giselle and Coppelia from time to time, the company's dancers are much more at ease with technically demanding, plotless ballets, particularly those by European choreographers such as Nacho Duato, Jiri Kylian and William Forsythe. Carmen offers them barefoot character roles instead.

The three women who alternated in the title role--Genevieve Guerard, Lisa Davies and Amanda Michelle Cyr--were coached independently by Veldman and director Patricia Doyle, with the result that interpretations were laudably different. The three Joses, though, were little more than cardboard cutouts. Davies's character was cold and calculating, a sort of black widow spider. Cyr's interpretation ricocheted between girl-next-door and brittle brat. Only Guerard offered a believable view of the seductress. Her Carmen was an inveterate tease. Accentuating every move with rolling hips, she slid like a hot flame up and down the bodies of men, an irresistible charmer confident in her sexuality and independence. Only in the all-too-brief death scene did she falter. Her Carmen didn't understand that the cost for pleasure would be her life.

Like Fernand Nault's Tommy, which revived Les Grands's failing fortunes two decades ago, Carmen has enormous public attraction. It is certain to tour Canada and travel abroad as well; plans to take it to Brazil in April and to the U.S. next fall have already been confirmed.