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OPERA APERTA
DON GIOVANNI LIGHT


Back in August 2000, Opera Aperta, a collaboration between Emmanuel Music director Craig Smith and celebrated-countertenor-turned-stage-director Drew Minter, made its opera-in-the-summer debut with Mozart’s Cosí fan tutte, and though it was odd to see a project that promotes opera in English sporting an Italian name ("open opera") and performing a work whose title is never translated, the production was welcome all the same. Last summer Opera Aperta gave us Rossini’s The Barber of Seville; this year Minter and company essay Mozart’s darkest opera, Don Giovanni, but not without a night light.

For opera in translation to work, you have to be able to make out the words; that’s why it works best in witty recitative (Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus is always done in the vernacular) and solo arias. For this Don Giovanni, Minter produced a zingy new free translation of the Lorenzo da Ponte libretto, and the chief beneficiary is Don Giovanni’s servant, Leporello, whether he’s rattling off his master’s conquests in the Catalogue Aria ("There are prudes and there are swingers/Lawyers, doctors, opera singers"), telling Masetto, "You look like old Geppetto," or glossing Don Giovanni’s choice of dinner music ("Everybody will know where this one comes from" when we hear "Non piú andrai" from Le nozze di Figaro). Yet when Mozart’s "drama giocosa" turns serious, it’s the Opera Aperta audience that winds up in the dark. You’d hardly guess from the finale’s blissful duet between Don Ottavio and Donna Anna that she’s asking him to wait a year so she can mourn her father’s death. Peasant lovers Masetto and Zerlina can and do say it with body language; for the nobler characters that’s sometimes not enough.

The other major problem with this production is its title character. My first impression of Nikolas Nackley’s Don Giovanni was David Schwimmer as an Irish tenor. That’s harsh, but he is both light-voiced and light in character, casual, even cynical, without demons or danger or depth (all of which presage his being dragged down to Hell). In the exchange with Leporello that opens the second act, he seems more like the servant than the master. David Kravitz’s saucy Leporello is the production’s big success: he has the clearest enunciation, and he makes the jokes live. Krista River as Zerlina is equally seductive whether presenting Aaron Engebreth’s puppy-dog Masetto with a switch and waggling her tail at him in her "Beat me" aria or straddling him restoratively after he’s been whacked by Don Giovanni; she’s also effective in expressing Zerlina’s Janus-like attraction to both men, and the way she sways her hips in her contredanse with Don Giovanni would make anyone jealous.

Sarah Pelletier’s Donna Elvira prompted thoughts of Marx Brothers "heroine" Margaret Dumont — another harsh comparison, but I do wish Minter had directed her to be less comic and more poignant. Charles Blandy’s Don Ottavio begins very much in the shadow of Jodi Frisbie’s Donna Anna, but he grows into his romantic arias. Frisbie is a tall, striking blonde who in her trouser outfit looks all set for Fidelio or Octavian; her voice can be a shade piercing, and she holds her hands to her breast too much, but she conveys the emotional depth that’s missing in Don Giovanni. Tae-Gap Tang is a commanding-looking Commendatore; that deep voice, however, should be capable of clearer enunciation.

Craig Smith conducts the Orchestra of Emmanuel Music with a weight, drama, and mystery that put me in mind of Otto Klemperer’s Mozart. Sarah Sullivan’s set of three movable smudgy walls gives off the heat of Seville while serving as both interior and exterior; Felicia MacNeill’s costumes have appropriate range (from Donna Elvira’s green ball gown to Zerlina’s white peasant dress) and color (Don Giovanni’s black and red, Donna Anna’s black and beige). The minuet that Don Ottavio, Donna Anna, and Donna Elvira improvise at Don Giovanni’s soirée is hilarious; so is the "Have a happy time in Hell" ensemble finale after our hero is consumed by fire and brimstone. But this Don Giovanni goes whistling into the dark.

(The remaining performances of Opera Aperta’s Don Giovanni are Friday August 9 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday August 11 at 2:30 p.m. Kelly Kaduce will replace Sarah Pelletier as Donna Elvira in these two performances. For tickets, call 617-353-8725 or go to www.opera-aperta.org)

BY JEFFREY GANTZ

Issue Date: August 8 - 15, 2002
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