Carmen

Mojacar is to host a special evening of Bizet's Carmen, by a Russian Opera group (sorry – I’ve lost the bit of paper). It promises to be a wonderful event. It has been organised by the Unicaja, for (according to a rare poster put out by the emblematic Almerian savings bank) April 1st at 10.00pm at the Artisan Centre in Mojacar pueblo. I went to the bank to get a poster, or maybe even a picture for the newspaper, or, goodness! Perhaps an advert. Nada! Tickets, I was told, are available at the local police. Free? Dunno.
In any event, I found that the tickets are in fact available at the Tourist Office, at ten euros, and the event is, according to them, at 9.30pm (not 10.00) at the Building Formerly Known as the Artisan Centre. The culture department from the ayuntamiento, in a press release, reckons it starts at 10.30pm!
It will be fun. Come early!
Perhaps they will even take down the posters from the Michael Strogoff show from last January and put this up instead. However, it's not the town hall specifically running this one.
Here we have the age-old problem of a local agency being given some cultural doo-dah to deal with. No interest, but some slight obligation. I remember a friend from the ministry in Madrid recalling ‘we would ring up the Russians and say – I’ll swap you a dozen Flamenco dancers for the Kirov Ballet. Vladimir would say.. 'Hokey!''
So, once again a major act appears in Almeria (in this case Mojacar) which is under-promoted, under-supported and under-rated. It’s as if we have been given some ‘cultshure’ by someone whose job it is to pass this stuff around (‘Hello, yes, send them down with a bit of information on them by fax’). You can imagine the reviews in the local daily, or – Hell, I’ll write them now…