Anika Noni Rose is not a humble performer. She views the audience’s attention as a kind of birthright. When I first saw her, in 2003, in George C. Wolfe’s production of Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s indelible musical, “Caroline, or Change,” I was struck not only by her self-possession in the role but by her curtain call. “Yes,” she seemed to say without saying it, as she bowed, not too deeply, “isn’t it wonderful that we’re here together to celebrate how great I was?” Divas ranging from Leontyne Price to Aretha Franklin to FKA Twigs have a similar hauteur, and why shouldn’t entitlement be part of their act? Certainly, in order to get their art out there, they’ve had to endure a level of crap that would have crushed more coddled performers. Watching Rose over a period of years, I wasn’t sure if the Connecticut native was a star or just an actress who worked steadily and got some good breaks, including winning a Tony, for “Caroline, or Change,” and landing the voice role of Tiana, one of relatively few animated protagonists of color, in the 2009 Disney feature “The Princess and the Frog.” Sometimes, when I saw Rose live—in revivals of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” in 2008, or “A Raisin in the Sun,” in 2014—or in the 2006 screen adaptation of “Dreamgirls,” my mind turned back to her air of self-satisfaction. Clearly, it had something to do with being black and female in a business that doesn’t particularly value either of those things: when all you really have is yourself, you’d better love that showgirl. But I wondered if there was something else to Rose’s affect. Maybe she just knew she was a star before anyone had come up with the right part to let her shine.

In John Doyle, Rose, who is forty-five, may have found her ideal director, someone who lets her play to her strengths, which include being interested in the drama of a scene, and in her character’s attraction to drama. The vehicle for Rose and Doyle’s startlingly strong collaboration is “Carmen Jones” (at the Classic Stage Company), a revival of the bizarre and politically archaic 1943 Broadway musical, with lyrics and book by Oscar Hammerstein II. Hammerstein based his show on Georges Bizet’s “Carmen,” the 1875 opera about a “fiery” Romani woman who brings down a nice Spanish soldier; working with Bizet’s score, he built his story around the similarly “fiery” and feckless Carmen Jones (Rose), a black woman employed in a segregated factory in the South during the Second World War.

Carmen doesn’t get much work done; she’s too busy flirting with Joe (Clifton Duncan), an Army officer who forsakes the love of Cindy Lou (Lindsay Roberts), a gentle, unassuming woman from his home town, for Carmen, who has red shiny lips and sometimes sports a bright-red rose in her cleavage. Beautiful to look at but dangerous to hold, Carmen loves a man in uniform—that is, as long as she can’t have him. Rose shows us that what excites Carmen is the thrill of the conquest; once she has something, she’s bored, and ready for the next challenge. Carmen’s slightly too knowing gal pal, Frankie (brilliantly played by Soara-Joye Ross), is no disapproving prude; she has plenty of snap and wants to grab onto her chance in life, too. But there are others, like Carmen’s nemesis, Sally (Andrea Jones-Sojola, another exceptional performer in a cast of exceptional performers), who can’t separate from the crowd and insist on going about things the “right” way. Whereas Sally will get by on hard work and good citizenship, Carmen, the libertine with soul, sees men as her way out.

Rose plays Carmen not with the strained sexuality that made Dorothy Dandridge’s characterization in Otto Preminger’s 1954 film version an exemplar of performance hysteria—that is to say, Dandridge gave more than she had as an artist and then gave even more. Instead, Rose is so self-assured and relaxed that you’re amused by her amusement in the part, and by her freedom. She carries the show, but she lets Carmen do the work, and it’s Rose’s investment in the character that illuminates the production from moment to moment. To bring Carmen to life, she channels her own sense of entitlement, wearing it like an invisible bauble. She’s “shady,” but full of light and merriment. Whenever Carmen walks off after a rousing exchange with women who are grudgingly admiring or envious of her—Carmen does nothing to improve relations—she leaves a trail of self-satisfaction behind her. I don’t know if Doyle cast Rose because of that quality, but I can no longer imagine anyone else as Carmen—in part because Rose plays her as what George W. S. Trow, Jr., would have called a flirt. “Not teasing—flirting,” Trow wrote, in a 1980 piece. “Does anyone know the difference? A tease is a con. . . . A flirt doesn’t do that. A flirt does a dance within the context of giving pleasure.”

The musical also gives full voice to Rose’s power as a singer. She’s no belter, though; in her first aria, Bizet’s “Habanera,” now called “Dat’s Love,” she draws out the ridiculous Amos-’n’-Andy lyrics (“You go for me an’ I’m taboo / But if you’re hard to get I go for you, / An’ if I do then you are through, boy, / My baby dat’s de end of you”) and makes them a true expression of Carmen’s defiance, rather than of her blackness. (“Carmen Jones”—and Hammerstein’s notion of race—owes something to the weaker moments of George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” such as “Buzzard Song” and all that jazz about signs and weather.) Doyle, by treating the text as a kind of sketch and having the all-black cast drop the “dem” and “dose” bullshit, releases the actors from the need to perform blackness; they are characters, who, in addition to being black, are sexual, or jealous, or lost, or all three at once. It’s a relief to see actors of color being allowed to concentrate on acting.

Still, it can take a little while to warm up to the production, especially if you had a bad time with the movie, which was my only experience with the material before I saw Doyle’s staging. Neither the musical nor the film has a shred of reality to it—or, at least, any reality that a black person or a wartime factory worker would recognize as such. The show is a figment of Hammerstein’s imagination, and he is to blame for what’s stupid about it. When the movie came out, it generated a lot of commercial heat, and Dandridge became the first black woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. Carmen Jones still occupies an interesting place in black female show-business fantasies; it’s one of the roles that the young actress in Spike Lee’s “Girl 6,” for instance, dreams of playing—she’s taken with the glamour of it all. And the movie of “Carmen Jones” does have some glamour, albeit lurid glamour. James Baldwin wrote about the film soon after its release. He wasn’t happy with it. One of his beefs was how the black men were handled, or not handled, onscreen, but in Doyle’s production the guys are not the focus. What you want to watch is Rose, who plays with the role in ways that Dandridge did not and could not, given the times. Fragile and stressed, Dandridge was on edge during the making of the film, one of her first starring roles. Comparing Dandridge’s panic with Rose’s centeredness is like watching a split-screen documentary about how “Carmen Jones” has changed as the actress’s relationship to the role has changed—has had to change, in order for us to believe in her.

Doyle doesn’t let us get sentimental about any of this, though. His staging, spare and quick but not rushed—only a great director could have fashioned this tight, ninety-five-minute, intermissionless jewel—shows Carmen as a woman who’s trying to survive. And, when the opportunity comes along to ditch Joe for a sexy and successful boxer named Husky Miller (David Aron Damane), who is fighting in Chicago and not some dumpy little town, Carmen grabs it, thus initiating the tale’s final tragedy, which is caused by her freedom with her body, her ability to say what she wants, no matter the cost to former lovers or to herself. While Carmen perishes, we watch Rose rise out of her extinguished body, like something glistening, like a star. ♦