Carmen Jones

Carmen Jones is a 1943 Broadway musical, later made into a 1954 musical film; the play also ran for a season in 1991 at London's Old Vic and most recently in London's Royal Festival Hall in the South Bank Centre in 2007. It is an updating of the Georges Bizet opera Carmen in an African-American setting. (Bizet's opera was, in turn, based on the 1846 novella by Prosper M?rim?e.) The Broadway musical was produced by Billy Rose, using an all-black cast.

Oscar Hammerstein II wrote the book (dialogue) and lyrics, but stuck rather closely to Bizet's original music, which was re-orchestrated for a Broadway orchestra by Robert Russell Bennett.

The original Broadway cast members were nearly all new to the stage; Kennedy and Muir write that on the first day of rehearsal only one member had ever been on a stage before.

The 1954 film was adapted by Hammerstein and Harry Kleiner. It was directed by Otto Preminger and starred Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte.