Way back in 2001, the York Theater Company staged a concert production of “Carmen Jones.” Anika Noni Rose, then 28, was cast as the angelic ingénue Cindy Lou, who sees the sensuous title character seduce her fiancé, Joe. At the time Ms. Rose had only one Broadway credit under her belt, hadn’t developed her voice enough to realize she was a soprano, and looked, she said, “like a 10-year-old.”
She knew she was cast as the character she fit best. But the whole time, there in the background, she was wondering: Are you sure you don’t want me to be Carmen Jones? Are you sure?
“I don’t ever remember not being aware of the show,” Ms. Rose recalled over a recent lunch at a Union Square hotel. She’d seen the movie version, starring Dorothy Dandridge (“my mother’s idol”) many times. And she knew Georges Bizet’s opera “Carmen,” the source material for Oscar Hammerstein’s adaptation, too.
Right now it’s hard for musical-theater fans not to be aware of Ms. Rose, thanks to her acclaimed performance in that long-dreamed-for title role of the Classic Stage Company production, which runs through Aug. 19.
John Doyle’s intimate rendition is the first full New York production of the show since its 1943 Broadway run. In those seven decades, “Carmen Jones” went into a sort of obscurity, marked by the very oddity of its essence: it’s Hammerstein without Rodgers, and an opera meant for Broadway.
In casting Carmen, Mr. Doyle initially thought about actors he’d worked with in his Tony-winning revival of “The Color Purple.” But when Ms. Rose’s representatives called to say she wanted to meet with him, he knew he’d found his star.
“You don’t audition people of her caliber,” he said.
“I knew this was her first time back in a major profile role in a musical in the city,” he added. “I also sensed the intelligence with which she leads her life. She waited and made a choice to do something that would presumably stretch her, shine her in a different light, singing in a way people don’t expect.”
Has Ms. Rose read her reviews, some of the best of her career? She confessed she hadn’t. “I know they’re positive but I don’t need to know exactly what they say, so don’t tell me,” she answered with a grin.
The musical resets the story to a parachute factory in South Carolina during World War II, but Carmen Jones, like the Bizet heroine, is both the object of men’s attention and women’s jealousy. Joe (played by Clifton Duncan) may be committed to Cindy Lou, Ms. Rose’s old part, but it’s Carmen who turns his life upside down, drawing him to follow her to Chicago.
“Her language is sex — whether it’s being had or not, it’s the potential promise of sex, the energy of sexual dalliances past,” Ms. Rose explained. “But she doesn’t owe Joe one thing. She doesn’t even say there will be something for him at the end of that train ride.”
Ms. Rose, who was reluctant to talk about her personal life to preserve her family’s privacy, grew up in Bloomfield, Conn., deeply influenced by a grandmother who instilled in her a love of history. They regularly read from “The Black Book,” Toni Morrison’s compilation of events both painful and glorious in the African-American experience.
As an actress, she’s embodied women who convey both — from her Tony Award-winning breakout as the daughter of a Southern maid who feels the stirrings of the civil rights movement in the 2004 musical “Caroline, or Change,” to her portrayal of the slave Kizzy in the 2016 remake of “Roots.”
She’s also played a 1960s pop star in the film adaptation of “Dreamgirls,” the president of a historically black university on “The Quad,” a ruthless lawyer on “The Good Wife,” and an evil kingpin in “Power” (a role she thinks her grandmother would have enjoyed).
And young fans still look up to her as the voice of Princess Tiana in the animated film “The Princess and the Frog.”
Ms. Rose said she was proud to be part of a project that gave children of color a Disney lead to identify with.
Growing up she made use of a yellow towel as a wig whenever she needed to feel glamorous or “princessy.” And when it came to musicals, she wanted to be Annie. (“She had an Afro, didn’t she?”)
But it wasn’t until she saw “Control”-era Janet Jackson that she felt a deep connection to an entertainment figure, an identification that set her on the path to a theater degree from Florida A&M University, and further studies at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.
“I did all the lip syncing, learned all her moves,” she said. “I had a yearning to be a part of things, but I don’t think I recognized it as such at the time.”
When it had its premiere, “Carmen Jones” was among the most ambitious all-black musicals of its time, but it also drew criticism for vernacular language that reinforced stereotypes about African-Americans.
Mr. Duncan referred to this “crudity” as a product of its time, and like Ms. Rose, he put his confidence in Mr. Doyle.
Beyond the language, Ms. Rose thinks people feared reviving the musical because it shows a sexually empowered black woman. It’s “messy, dirty, lush, sweaty and human” she said.
The show remains a timely reminder of what men expect from women, she added. She described a recent encounter with a stranger who approached her on the street.
“Why are you so close to me?” she asked. “I thought we were walking together,” he replied. She crossed the street as a cab was approaching. “I could hear anger in his voice as he said, ‘Don’t get hit by that cab,’ like that would be my punishment for running away from him,” she recalled.
Mr. Duncan and Ms. Rose first met four years ago in a workshop of the musical “Shuffle Along,” which made its way to Broadway in 2016, but without the actress. (Her only appearances there since “Caroline, or Change” have been in revivals of the plays “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “A Raisin in the Sun she was Angelica in one “Hamilton” workshop, too.)
Ms. Rose said that despite their familiarity, her co-star took a while to get used to the idea of inflicting violence on her character.
The final scene in the show is bathed in red light and set mostly in silence. “There’s a terror and a pleading in her eyes right before the end,” Mr. Duncan explained. “It breaks my heart every night.”
For Ms. Rose, that pain transcends the stage. Two Decembers ago, she said, she was sexually assaulted on an airplane while she was sleeping. She spoke about it for the first time during an interview on SiriusXM Radio, and when she brought it up during lunch, it was the only moment when the light vanished from her face.
“I still haven’t found who that person was and I still want to, because I thought that’s the most punk-ass thing to do to somebody,” she said. “It’s so ugly, weak and disgusting.”
In the final scene in “Carmen Jones” when she looks into the eyes of the man who is about to kill her character, she thinks about a pain beyond her own.
“What I want in that time is to allow myself to feel every fear, every hurt, and to let it move through me, and don’t let any of that close off — for all the women who have had to, and will have to,” she said.
There are no plans for “Carmen Jones” to continue beyond Classic Stage, and Ms. Rose is thinking about her next challenge, which she hopes will include producing. She pointed to Jordan Peele, Young Jean Lee and Donald Glover as inspiring artists who follow their own instincts.
“I’d like to be able to put my filter on the story, put my lens on it,” she said. “Who can I bring along with me? How can I bring women to the forefront?
“How can I show us just living — just moving through life and growing?” she added. “Being knocked over by the wind and picking ourselves up? How many ways can I do that?”
