After many years of touring programs of assorted opera scenes, new Artistic Director Peter Kazaras created a model for the next seven years: a fall tour, to every corner of Washington State and sometimes farther afield, of a small ‘black-box’ opera production starring Seattle Opera’s Young Artists. Simple sets and costumes and piano accompaniment kept the focus tightly on the program’s exciting young talent, who played to congenial audiences in places such as Walla Walla, Yakima, Bellingham, and the San Juan Islands. The first of these operas was Peter Brook’s brilliant distillation of <i>Carmen</i>, which Kazaras himself had performed in New York in the ‘80s.