HAVANA, Dec 26th  (PL) The National Lyric Theater of Cuba will stage the dramatic opera Carmen, based on the homonymous novel by the French writer Prosper Mérimée, at Havana”s Bertolt Bretch Cultural Center on Saturday and Sunday.

Under the artistic direction of Roberto Chorens, the company, founded in Havana in 1962, will play a love story blended with jealousy, deception and treason. Carmen’s characters, Corporal Don Jose and Escamillo, will be reborn on Cuba’s stage with music by the French composer Georges Bizet and a script by his compatriots Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac.

First staged at the Opera-Comique of Paris in the 1870s, Carmen raised debate among critics attached to the conventionalisms of that period. However, it later conquered the lovers of lyric art in France, due to its catchy melodies and folkloric-romantic topic in Seville, Spain.

With a broad repertoire of operas like Tosca, The Barber of Seville, Carmen and Madame Butterfly, in addition to traditional Spanish operettas like Cecilia Valdés, Amalia Batista and El cafetal, the National Lyric Theater of Cuba maintains the tradition of melodramatic musicals in Cuba.