Afternoon On Broadway

Carmen Jones. Choosing to make an America/English adaptation of George Bizet's French opera comique, Carmen, Hammerstein chose to update, racially alter and Americanize it by setting it in the American South, with an African-American cast of military men and parachute manufacturing women and men, all serving America and the world during World War II. It ends in tragedy, but like his 1927 Show Boat, Hammerstein explores what it was like to be an African-American in the United States from the 1880s to the 1920s. 75th anniversary of the original Broadway production.