'Carmen' Tragic, sultry seductress

She's sweating. She's dancing. She's breathing.

She can draw parallels between her newfound passion for boxing and her lifelong love for singing - beyond the idea that both involve rhythm and a dance of sorts.

"You have to be extremely light on your feet, extremely quick. You have to have coordinated breath," she explained last week from Phoenix, where she had found a trainer at an LA Fitness to work with her during her Arizona Opera run of "Carmen." "You never let down; it's constant. It's not about being tense; it's about being loose. You get your power from reaching into your center and being able to kind of pivot around, and I find that a really interesting parallel to how it feels to sing."

This weekend, we get to hear and see the mezzo-soprano in a role that many critics argue she was built to sing. "Six feet tall and sultry, with a mane of dark hair, she took the stage . . . as a Carmen prepared to eat the whole wimpy garrison of soldiers for breakfast. . . . She is a fine, impressive Carmen, and she has the tools to become a truly great one," the New York Times opined. Added The Austin Chronicle: "Whether she's singing - Clayton's mezzo boasts its own dusky allure - or just standing, this Carmen attracts like a force of nature."

"I'll take that," Clayton said of the accolades, which were news to her. She never reads reviews, she said, explaining that it is the nature of her artistic beast that nothing anyone says about her in print will be enough.

"If they say one good thing, why didn't they say the other? If they say a bad thing, maybe it's true; maybe it's not," she said. "While I'm performing something, I try not to let myself go there. Maybe I'll read them later; maybe I'll never read them."

But Clayton will allow that she feels an innate kinship to Carmen - the role of the sultry Gypsy whose flirtatious ways lead to her tragic demise.

"I love this role so much. Musically, it's a great arc through the evening. There is nothing that I don't like to sing," she said. "Characterwise, you go in full throttle. I step in and just be. You just kind of assume it. I don't really find my separation between myself and that character after I start."

Clayton, who alternates the role of Carmen with Jossie Pérez, is making her Arizona Opera debut with this new production of "Carmen," directed by Kay Walker Castaldo in her company debut. The performance takes place in a center-stage bullring - there even are 75 on-stage bullring-side seats for audience members willing to shell out $100 for an upgrade.

"The chorus is actually sitting in the grandstands, and they are sort of like a Greek chorus. All of the action takes place on the floor of the bullring, if you will," Clayton said during a phone call earlier this week. "There's a troupe of dancers that are amazing, and it's highly choreographed. But the chorus is strictly singing. They are the commentators, so they sort of provide this backdrop. And for them, it's a combination of boring and a relief, because they get to just sit and sing beautifully. And they do. This chorus sounds fantastic. But they're not involved in interacting with us literally."

Instead, the dancers, central characters and a few supernumeraries (actors who don't sing) take center ring. Clayton said she makes her entrance from 15 feet in the air, assisted down by those dancers.

Clayton also gets to dance a bit in the opening of the second act and play castanets.

"It's a lot of good sensual physicality throughout the evening without being gratuitous," she said. "It's part of the vocabulary."

Arizona last mounted Bizet's hugely popular final work five years ago.

If you go

Bizet's "Carmen"

• When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday.

• Where: Tucson Music Hall, 260 S. Church Ave.

• Tickets: $20.50 to $107.50 through www.ticketmaster.com Limited number of on-stage seats for an upgrade fee of $100 for subscribers, $125 for single tickets.

• Running time: 3 hours with one intermission.

'It Gets better'

Mezzo-soprano Beth Clayton and her longtime partner, New York Metropolitan Opera soprano Patricia Racette, filmed a video for the YouTube "It Gets Better" campaign. In the video, the couple offer encouraging words to young gays and lesbians who might be struggling with their identities.

"I'm hoping that people who are needing desperately to hear that message will hear it," Clayton said. "I had a young gay guy in the chorus come up to me and hug me and say 'thank you.' It just doesn't get much better than that. Anything we can do by the example of our own lives that can inspire people or sustain people a bit, give them encouragement, that's the least that we can do."

The project launched in September after a rash of gay teen suicides. Go online to www.youtube.com/user/itgetsbetterproject to see the videos.

Contact reporter Cathalena E. Burch at cburch@azstarnet.com or 573-4642.