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Musically, the show has the easy, informal delight of a cabaret, moving breezily between spoken stretches and arias from “Carmen”; we hear “Parle-moi de ma mère,” the “Seguidilla,” “La fleur que tu m’avais jetée” and, of course, the “Habanera,” each enhanced by a certain meta-charm.

We’d do the Seguidilla from “Carmen” and she’d explain that that was plea bargaining.

There were romances and the early, original forms of all those Spanish dances that went on to pervade Europe and the world at large, such as the fandango and seguidilla.

Frederick Ballentine, a promising tenor, had especially heavy lifting with “E lucevan le stele” from “Tosca,” the Seguidilla scene from “Carmen” and a painful aria from Philip Glass’s “Appomattox,” the opera presented here so successfully in 2015, recounting the Ku Klux Klan’s slaughter of a hundred black militiamen.

Consider the first act, in which Carmen’s famous Habanera and Seguidilla lay out her seductive powers and relationship to the world around her.