Carmen Jones is a 1943 Broadway musical, in which a parachute maker: Carmen Jones, makes a play for a soldier named Joe, who is in love with sweet Cindy Lou. After meeting boxer Husky Miller, she is asked along with her friends Frankie and Mert, to go to a boxing match with them. She declines. She eventually gets bored with Joe and leaves. Later, Carmen abandons Joe to pursue Husky Miller. She accepts his invitation to go to his boxing match. Joe then abandons Cindy to pursue Carmen; when she rejects him, he kills her. 

  In 1954 in was the base for the musical film and the play also ran for a season in 1991 at London’s Old Vic. The play is an updating of the Georges Bizet opera Carmen in an Afican-American setting. Bizet's opera was, in turn, based on the 1846Novella by Prosper Mérimée. The Broadway musical was produced by Billy Rose, using an all-black cast. Oscar Hammerstein II wrote the book , dialogue and lyrics, but stuck rather closely to Bizet's original music, which was re-orchestrated for a Broadway orchestra by Robert Russell Bennett.

 Preview performances: 25 July - 29 July

The London Philharmonic Orchestra performs on 26, 27, 29 and 31 July, and 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 15, 16, 19, 21, 24, 25, 30 and 31 August. 
 

The Philharmonia Orchestra performs on 25 and 28 July, 1, 2, 8, 12, 14, 17, 18, 22, 23, 26, 28 and 29 August, and 1 and 2 September.