Director Keturah Stickann is neither a native San Diegan nor a current resident, but few San Diego Opera regulars have deeper ties to our local company. In leading Carmen, the Opera’s third production of its 2025-26 season, she returns to an institution she first supported as a principal dancer while with San Diego’s homegrown Malashock Dance Company.
“I moved out here as a dancer in 2001,” she explained while taking a break from Carmen’s final staging — the important physical realization of the drama on stage in movement, physical interactions and gestures — ten days before opening night on Friday. “I danced for Malashock Dance Company for four years, and I lived here for 10 years. Malashock instantly became San Diego Opera’s dance company.”
Born in Charleston, IL, and raised by a costume designer mother and writer/actor father in Missouri, Stickann was immersed early and often in community theater and dance. After earning degrees in dance education and choreography, she led a seven-year dance career that culminated in two regional Emmy Awards for dance films (Soul of Saturday Night and Love & Murder) by Malashock’s troupe in which she was principal dancer.
“Of everything I did in my dance career, my film work is what I’m most proud of. I did a film [Utazo] in Hungary on my own as well, after I had left Malashock Dance. Those films are really important to me,” she recalled.
When her body began signaling it was time to pivot professionally, her exposure to opera via San Diego Opera and early experiences with France’s Opera National du Rhin and Chicago’s DePaul University set in motion a quarter-century career partnering with forty-one different opera organizations including the elite Metropolitan, Chicago Lyric, Houston Grand, and Santa Fe and San Francisco Operas, in virtually every capacity except singing. A highlight is surely her selection by Jake Heggie, arguably the most-performed contemporary American opera composer (Dead Man Walking), to direct the world premiere of his opera If I Were You.
“I have a long history with Jake. I assisted [director/librettist] Leonard Foglia on Moby Dick and It’s a Wonderful Life, and Jake and I got along famously,” said Stickann. “So Jake and Gene Scheer both reached out to me and said, ‘You’ve done such great work, we’re doing If I Were You at [San Francisco’s prestigious young artist training program] Merola and we would love you to come on board as director.’ That was a really exciting moment for me, in my relationship with Jake and with a particular love of mine: doing new and modern, contemporary work.”
But Stickann’s longest affiliation by far — twenty-one years, twenty-some operas — has been San Diego Opera, where she’s filled roles from Resident Assistant Stage Director and Choreographer to, in recent years, Director. In 2020-21, Stickann played a key role in a pioneering effort to adapt San Diego Opera to COVID’s potentially deal-breaking social-distancing requirement.
“I didn’t come up with the drive-in opera concept; it was [CEO/General Director] David Bennett’s idea,” Stickann said. “When he first mentioned it to me, we had to really sort of pivot and think about how we were going to do that. I was instrumental in dealing with how we told the story when we had to be at least six feet apart [with 15 feet in front of singers’ mouths] as we were singing.
“La Boheme is a hard story to tell that way! Because we couldn’t get anywhere near each other it became a sort of a ghost story. We learned a lot about what people were seeing in their cars, and what was available to us as from a storytelling aspect. So when we came back for Barber of Seville we played it so much more to the [projection] screens than we did to the proscenium space. That was a huge jump in how we were able to tell that story.”
Georges Bizet’s ever-relevant Carmen — a woman who refuses possession meets a man undone by needing it — sits at the center of operas that Stickann’s done most: “If I count Tragedy of Carmen [Peter Brook’s version, performed by San Diego Opera in 2017], which is the first Carmen I did, I think six is where we’re sitting right now. I’ve done a bunch of Carmens just in the last couple of years. So Carmen has sort of been on my mind.”
At the broadest level, Stickann’s conception of Carmen hasn’t changed. “There are things that have evolved and little bits that have made their way into it, but this piece, to me, especially looking at it with a modern lens and eye, is about a domestic violence relationship and how that plays out,” she said. “That’s how I’ve always approached it. I go into the implications of the Roma people [the character’s ethnic identity], and their relationship to the greater world that much maligns them.
“But when it comes down to the core of this piece, it comes back to a man who cannot control his emotions and his anger, and a woman who gets caught up in it and doesn’t know how to extract herself. This is something that rings true for us. This is why Carmen persists. It is because women still die at the hands of men.”
Though, for Stickann, Carmen is Carmen, how she stages it has continued to evolve. “The last time I did this production was at Indiana University, a new production [in 2025],” she recalled. “We set it in 1920s Spain, the Primo de Rivera era, the first dictatorship that came barreling through Spain. I love that period because it’s got a modern feel to it, but we can also deal with past norms.
“But this production is the Denyce Graves production from both Glimmerglass [New York] and Minnesota, but I’m not redoing Denyce’s staging. I’m doing my own thing on top of it. The biggest difference is that Denyce’s production has been updated into a more modern space. We’re setting it where there’s no cell phones, somewhere in the 1980 or 90s. Things had to change in order to tell the story in that world.”
This weekend, Lisa Marue Rogali plays the defiantly magnetic Carmen Friday and Sunday against Thomas Kinch as the suggestively volatile Don José. Guadalupe Paz and Jonny Kaufman play the doomed couple on Saturday, March 28. Eight cast members fill the 1875 opera’s secondary or comprimario roles.
“It’s a great group,” Stickann said. “Most of the cast is new to me, which is really exciting. I have worked with Søren Peterson, who is playing Morales. He was in our Boheme last year; it’s lovely to have him back. But the person that I’ve really worked with the most is [conductor] Louis Lohraseb. We’ve done a number of Carmens [on our own] and one together. So between the two of us, we were able to really come in and just go for it. And the singers have responded in kind.”
As almost everyone seems to know, actor Timothée Chalamet recently described opera in these blunt terms: “I don’t want to be working in ballet, or opera, where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive,’ even though no one cares about this anymore.” Stickann response is candid and unoffended.
“He was dismissive in the quality in which he made the statement, and I think it was a little bit disingenuous, but quite honestly, we’re struggling for audiences and I wish that wasn’t the case,” she said. “I don’t know how to fix it right now — other than just to continue to make really quality, solid work and to continue to tell stories that are relevant, that spark emotion in the audiences that are showing up.”
San Diego Opera’s ‘Carmen’ promises to do just that.
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