On a filthy wet autumn night, Opera North transports us to the 1960-70s and a dodgy bar, where a bunch of squaddies are hanging around waiting for the floor show. The girls emerge through the red curtain, complete with tassels and cigarette holders, and gyrate while the men call for star of the show. So Carmen arrives from on high, on a swing-seat, and sings her first number, Habanera.

Director Edward Dick and his team have thought through this production. The bright colours of the Sixties mini shift-dresses; the bouffants; Carmen’s friends and co-workers Mercedes and Frasquita looking like the stars of the tv series The Liver Birds; and Escamillo, more rhinestone cowboy than classic toreador, performing the Toreador Song like a come-back Elvis, to acclaim in the bar. Acts 2 and 3 take place in the back-stage dressing-room, where we find that the three women have children. Act 4 has the chorus belting it out as they gather for the bullfight as if they were Leeds United fans at Elland Road.

And it works.

As Carmen, Chrystal E. Williams is a grown woman, knowing what she is doing. She has a full, rich sound and dominates the stage - whether in red for her show song, yellow for off-duty or brown velour gaucho culottes and fringed jacket for the bullfight - with her personality as much as her voice. It makes it hard for Don José, as Erin Caves took over the role at short notice when Plan A fell victim to long Covid. Caves occasionally sounds under-powered, but his passion for Carmen, his guilt about his mother and his lack of engagement with Micaela is beyond doubt.

Camila Titinger’s Micaela introduces a new complication to the story – she is pregnant and one guesses that is the message she has brought Don José. This is no naïve young girl but, again, a grown woman. She sings with clarity and purpose, and her stand-off with Carmen over a vacillating Don José is excellent.

After his fight over Carmen with Don José, Escamillo’s reprise of ‘Toreador, en garde’ is deliciously sardonic. He is obviously a local boy made good in the bull-ring who recorded a hit single – a bit like footballers used to do – which his fans expect him to sing all the time. Phillip Rhodes sings with gusto and bravado, less arrogant than some portrayals, more loved by his on-stage audience.

Helen Evora (Mercedes) and Amy Freston (Frasquita) are lively co-workers and caring friends. Dancairo (Dean Robinson) and Remendado (Stuart Laing) are louche drug-smugglers. Matthew Stiff is a quite wonderfully drunken lieutenant Zuniga, and Christopher Nairne’s Morales is really bothering Micaela. In the mute role of Lillas Pastia, Nando Messias is superb, supervising the bar, taking a cut of the girls’ earnings, and dancing in the overtures and interludes – the fan dance and the dance in Stetson and chaps being highlights.

Garry Walker, in this his first production as Music Director of Opera North, sets a cracking pace from the first notes of the overture, and the orchestra never lets him down. Walker and Dick have shown that an opera can be updated, but still remain true to the original vision.