Milwaukee Ballet Closes Season with a Courageous ‘Carmen’

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Photo via Milwaukee Ballet - Facebook

Carmen - Milwaukee Ballet 2025

The Milwaukee Ballet Company perform 'Carmen' 2025

Milwaukee Ballet titled its season’s closing concert Carmen, named for the main event of the show, which also featured a stunning 20-minute world premiere by last season’s Genesis winner Tsai Hsi Hung called In the Dark.

The concert marked the United States premiere, and second production ever, of choreographer Mark Godden’s Carmen, a tragicomic story ballet built on the tunes and tale of Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera. Godden created it in 2018 for a young company in Guadalajara, Mexico, but the show we saw last weekend was extensively rechoreographed to honor the skills and talents of Milwaukee Ballet’s international dance company. It was virtually a second world premiere.

In The Dark was the opener. Hung is a visual artist as well as a choreographer, and just as most plays begin with a script, her dances emerge from her paintings. She wrote in a program note that the 2025 painting that laid the ground for In the Dark “explores the darker aspects of our psyche.” 

A photo of that painting appeared beside the note. It’s an expressionist portrait fractured almost to the point of complete abstraction. What stands out is a human eyeball, with lines suggesting an upper lash and eyebrow, and some ferocious looking upper teeth above an outthrust chin. There’s a heart in there, too. But most of the piece is a kind of scream of bright colors stroked and swiped into wild shapes and angles on a pitch-black background. With ten collaborating dancers, Hung brought it all to life in dance.

Intensity, Anger and Color

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Photo by Iryna Levit

Milwaukee Ballet Comany - In the Dark (2025)

The Milwaukee Ballet Company performs 'In the Dark' (2025)

Let me immediately acknowledge the contributions of music composer Tzu-Chi Liu, lighting designer Jason Fassl, and costume designer Mary Piering. Tzu-Chi’s synthesized music for orchestra with powerful percussion, a vast, wordless chorus and a high soprano soloist was breathtaking. Fassl’s stunning lighting featured near-constant shifts in direction, source, intensity, angle and color on a stage empty but for black drapery. We were treated to sudden explosions of deep purple fog that flooded the whole stage.

Add to that, Piering’s tight pitch-black costumes with painted white smudges that looked swiped on by hand; bare chests for the men; free-flowing hair for the women.

Those five men and five women dancers could be understood to represent our inner workings, impulses, energies, subconscious drives, fears and tensions that can add up to the feeling that you’re losing your mind. Movement was very fast, always precise, never repetitive, sometimes ferocious, sometimes soft-edged but haunted. Dancers would signal with arms and hands at top speed, and crawl in unison on hands and knees, or find themselves suddenly high in the air. The women would pop up and down in their pointe shoes in ways you don’t see in other ballets.

They all gave their all, and no one more than leading artist Barry Molina in his farewell performance. I felt like one of the Darling children waving goodbye to Peter Pan, one of Barry’s unforgettable roles.

Acting and Dancing

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Photo via Milwaukee Ballet - Facebook

Carmen - Milwaukee Ballet 2025

Marize Fumero in Milwaukee Ballet's 'Carmen' (2025)

In Godden’s Carmen, acting is as important as dancing. On opening night, Marize Fumero was Carmen, Eric Figueredo her lover/murderer, Kristen Marshall his spurned fiancé, Josiah Cook the autocratic Lieutenant, and Randy Crespo everybody’s favorite toreador.

The story in Bizet’s opera is an old-school melodrama. Carmen would have been considered “saucy.” The murderous rage of her short-lived boyfriend Don José might seem reasonable after she’s cooly ditched him for a star in the bullring. The Don’s pitiable ex-fiancé might even be forgiven for turning him in to the cops, since she’ll obviously die an “old maid” now. Old school justice has been served.

Godden wisely kept Bizet’s beloved melodies by using the greatly edited instrumental arrangement that Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin constructed for his Bolshoi Ballet ballerina wife almost a century ago. Godden also updated the characterizations and lightened the storytelling. The self-possessed Carmen is tragically murdered, yes; and her brutal killer is thankfully brought to justice by his grieving and heroic former girlfriend. If that doesn’t sound as different as it felt, it’s because so much lay in the performances.

Fumero gave Carmen great dignity and honesty. Figueredo gave Don José the fragility that comes with mental disorder. Marshall made you want to cheer while tears swelled. Cook was a relentless a-hole, and Crespo a celebrity-loving comic.

And they’re surrounded by a dancing corps of eight men and eight women. The men play the Lieutenant’s band of soldiers; the women are Carmen’s fellow workers in a cigarette factory; after hours, they’re townsfolk. The violence is beautifully staged by having them all surround Don José and Carmen in layers at the crucial moment. All we see is his hand with the knife coming down—until the townsfolk back away, revealing Carmen’s body.

Background projections, lighting, and costumes were wonderful. The smaller Pabst Theatre served this concert well. I found both works courageously original experiments and lovely entertainments.