SHE'S FLIRTY, HE'S COMPLEX IN `CARMEN'.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

In the confident hands and coolly smirking mouth of Jennifer Larmore, a cigar is much more than just a cigar.

It's a sly, playful reminder of who ultimately holds the cards when it comes to male-female relations. Hint: It isn't the sex that enters Ernest Hemingway look-alike contests.

Not that Larmore needs any humdrum Freudian symbolism to lift her performance in L.A. Opera's new production of ``Carmen.'' Making her much-anticipated stage debut in the title role, the Atlanta-born mezzo-soprano, whose forte is bel canto singing, proves she has the deep-burgundy vocal coloring and the acting chops required of Bizet's beloved tragic heroine.

And while her voice isn't quite domineering enough for this role, Larmore's strong-willed, charismatic presence and quicksilver emotional shape-shifting are ideal for opera's ultimate femme fatale.

Originally staged two years ago by Washington Opera, Swedish director Ann-Margret Pettersson's production sends out some mixed psychological signals. When Larmore first appears as the cigar-brandishing temptress, she's decked out in a black riding habit, looking more like Don Juan's reckless daughter than a lowly cigarette factory worker.

Is this meant as some kind of fantasy representation of how Carmen is perceived by the love-struck Don Jose (Placido Domingo)? If so, the concept isn't carried through. In any case, Larmore's Carmen is less a bewitching vamp than a heedless flirt bent on a fatal course. Though she purrs and growls, snaps her body like a whip and throws curves every which way, in the end she's a refreshingly down-to-earth sensualist, not a Hollywood harlot.

Similarly, Domingo's rumpled Don Jose suggests a flawed, complex human being rather than an opera comique archetype. He's an old lion anxiously stalking an obscure object of desire, a volatile mix of fragility and pride that's expertly realized in the famous ``Flower Song.'' Domingo ends this passionate plea to his lover curled like a schoolboy around his mother's knee - while somehow looking no less the man for it. It's a great moment only a great tenor could pull off.

Working with far more one-dimensional characters, two other singers find ways to shine. Richard Bernstein brings a comic self-awareness to the puffed-up machismo of the toreador Escamillo, while soprano Carla Maria Izzo has an anguished sweetness that stops short of sappiness in portraying the long-suffering Micaela.

Conductor Bertrand de Billy keeps maudlin sentiments at bay while putting just enough gloss on the Iberian embroidery of Bizet's German-Romantic score. By turns naturalistic and aggressively poetic, this ``Carmen'' is often very beautiful to look at. Following the lead of many other directors, Pettersson has transposed the action from the 1870s to the 1930s, turning the soldiers into Franco's fascist legions and the gypsies into Republicans clad in black berets and cartridge belts. Designer Lennart Mork suffuses the opening Seville street scene with ochre light, a bit of graffiti mockingly scratched onto a wall. At the start of Act 3, a vast sheet of blue-white fabric unfurls in a showy but lovely abstraction of the morning sky.

This ``Carmen'' isn't quite the long, deep gulp of perfumed air it wants to be, but neither is it blowing smoke.

The facts

What: ``Carmen.''

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown Los Angeles.

When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept 22 and 25; 2 p.m. Saturday.

Tickets: $25 to $137. Call [phone].

Our rating: three stars

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Photo

PHOTO Placido Domingo and Jennifer Larmore star in L.A. Opera's production of ``Carmen.''