{"id":233180,"date":"2026-03-23T22:27:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T22:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/233180\/"},"modified":"2026-03-23T22:27:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T22:27:08","slug":"director-of-san-diego-operas-carmen-promises-a-magnetic-modern-adaptation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/233180\/","title":{"rendered":"Director of San Diego Opera’s ‘Carmen’ promises a magnetic, modern adaptation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Keturah<\/a>Keturah Stickann. (Photo courtesy of the artist)<\/p>\n

Director Keturah Stickann<\/a> is neither a native San Diegan nor a current resident, but few San Diego Opera regulars have deeper ties to our local company. In leading Carmen, the Opera\u2019s third production of its 2025-26 season, she returns to an institution she first supported as a principal dancer while with San Diego\u2019s homegrown Malashock Dance Company<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\u201cI moved out here as a dancer in 2001,\u201d she explained while taking a break from Carmen\u2019s final staging \u2014 the important physical realization of the drama on stage in movement, physical interactions and gestures \u2014 ten days before opening night on Friday. \u201cI danced for Malashock Dance Company for four years, and I lived here for 10 years. Malashock instantly became San Diego Opera\u2019s dance company.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born in Charleston, IL, and raised by a costume designer mother and writer\/actor father in Missouri, Stickann was immersed early and often in community theater and dance. After earning degrees in dance education and choreography, she led a seven-year dance career that culminated in two regional Emmy Awards for dance films (Soul of Saturday Night\u00a0and\u00a0Love & Murder) by Malashock\u2019s troupe in which she was principal dancer. <\/p>\n

\u201cOf everything I did in my dance career, my film work is what I\u2019m most proud of. I did a film [Utazo] in Hungary on my own as well, after I had left Malashock Dance. Those films are really important to me,\u201d she recalled.<\/p>\n

When her body began signaling it was time to pivot professionally, her exposure to opera via San Diego Oper<\/a>a and early experiences with France\u2019s Opera National du Rhin and Chicago\u2019s DePaul University set in motion a quarter-century career partnering with forty-one different opera organizations including the elite Metropolitan, Chicago Lyric, Houston Grand, and Santa Fe and San Francisco Operas, in virtually every capacity except singing. A highlight is surely her selection by Jake Heggie, arguably the most-performed contemporary American opera composer (Dead Man Walking), to direct the world premiere of his opera If I Were You.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI have a long history with Jake. I assisted [director\/librettist] Leonard Foglia on Moby Dick and It\u2019s a Wonderful Life, and Jake and I got along famously,\u201d said Stickann. \u201cSo Jake and Gene Scheer both reached out to me and said, \u2018You\u2019ve done such great work, we\u2019re doing If I Were You at [San Francisco\u2019s prestigious young artist training program] Merola and we would love you to come on board as director.\u2019 That was a really exciting moment for me, in my relationship with Jake and with a particular love of mine: doing new and modern, contemporary work.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Stickann\u2019s longest affiliation by far \u2014 twenty-one years, twenty-some operas \u2014 has been San Diego Opera, where she\u2019s filled roles from Resident Assistant Stage Director and Choreographer to, in recent years, Director. In 2020-21, Stickann played a key role in a pioneering effort to adapt San Diego Opera to COVID\u2019s potentially deal-breaking social-distancing requirement.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t come up with the drive-in opera concept; it was [CEO\/General Director] David Bennett\u2019s idea,\u201d Stickann said. \u201cWhen he first mentioned it to me, we had to really sort of pivot and think about how we were going to do that.\u00a0 I was instrumental in dealing with how we told the story when we had to be at least six feet apart [with 15 feet in front of singers\u2019 mouths] as we were singing.<\/p>\n

\u201cLa Boheme is a hard story to tell that way! Because we couldn\u2019t get anywhere near each other it became a sort of a ghost story. We learned a lot about what people were seeing in their cars, and what was available to us as from a storytelling aspect. So when we came back for Barber of Seville we played it so much more to the [projection] screens than we did to the proscenium space. That was a huge jump in how we were able to tell that story.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Georges Bizet\u2019s ever-relevant Carmen \u2014 a woman who refuses possession meets a man undone by needing it \u2014 sits at the center of operas that Stickann\u2019s done most: \u201cIf I count Tragedy of Carmen [Peter Brook\u2019s version, performed by San Diego Opera in 2017], which is the first Carmen I did, I think six is where we\u2019re sitting right now. I\u2019ve done a bunch of Carmens just in the last couple of years. So Carmen has sort of been on my mind.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the broadest level, Stickann\u2019s conception of Carmen hasn\u2019t changed. \u201cThere are things that have evolved and little bits that have made their way into it, but this piece, to me, especially looking at it with a modern lens and eye, is about a domestic violence relationship and how that plays out,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s how I\u2019ve always approached it. I go into the implications of the Roma people [the character\u2019s ethnic identity], and their relationship to the greater world that much maligns them. <\/p>\n

\u201cBut when it comes down to the core of this piece, it comes back to a man who cannot control his emotions and his anger, and a woman who gets caught up in it and doesn\u2019t know how to extract herself. This is something that rings true for us. This is why Carmen persists. It is because women still die at the hands of men.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though, for Stickann, Carmen is Carmen, how she stages it has continued to evolve. \u201cThe last time I did this production was at Indiana University, a new production [in 2025],\u201d she recalled. \u201cWe set it in 1920s Spain, the Primo de Rivera era, the first dictatorship that came barreling through Spain. I love that period because it\u2019s got a modern feel to it, but we can also deal with past norms.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

\u201cBut this production is the Denyce Graves production from both Glimmerglass [New York] and Minnesota, but I\u2019m not redoing Denyce\u2019s staging. I\u2019m doing my own thing on top of it. The biggest difference is that Denyce\u2019s production has been updated into a more modern space. We\u2019re setting it where there\u2019s no cell phones, somewhere in the 1980 or 90s. Things had to change in order to tell the story in that world.\u201d<\/p>\n

This weekend, Lisa Marue Rogali plays the defiantly magnetic Carmen Friday and Sunday against Thomas Kinch as the suggestively volatile Don Jos\u00e9. Guadalupe Paz and Jonny Kaufman play the doomed couple on Saturday, March 28. Eight cast members fill the 1875 opera\u2019s secondary or comprimario roles.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a great group,\u201d Stickann said. \u201cMost of the cast is new to me, which is really exciting. I have worked with S\u00f8ren Peterson, who is playing Morales. He was in our Boheme last year; it\u2019s lovely to have him back. But the person that I\u2019ve really worked with the most is [conductor] Louis Lohraseb.\u00a0 We\u2019ve done a number of Carmens [on our own] and one together. So between the two of us, we were able to really come in and just go for it. And the singers have responded in kind.\u201d<\/p>\n

As almost everyone seems to know, actor Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet recently described opera in these blunt terms: \u201cI don\u2019t want to be working in ballet, or opera, where it\u2019s like, \u2018Hey, keep this thing alive,\u2019 even though no one cares about this anymore.\u201d Stickann response is candid and unoffended. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe was dismissive in the quality in which he made the statement, and I think it was a little bit disingenuous, but quite honestly, we\u2019re struggling for audiences and I wish that wasn\u2019t the case,\u201d she said. \u201cI don\u2019t know how to fix it right now \u2014 other than just to continue to make really quality, solid work and to continue to tell stories that are relevant, that spark emotion in the audiences that are showing up.\u201d <\/p>\n

San Diego Opera\u2019s \u2018Carmen\u2019 promises to do just that.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Keturah Stickann. (Photo courtesy of the artist) Director Keturah Stickann is neither a native San Diegan nor a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":233181,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[78645,105681,10239,74,76,75,21677],"class_list":["post-233180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-carmen","tag-keturah-stickann","tag-opera","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news","tag-san-diego-opera"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233180\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}