Review by Mark Morris
Photos by Nanc Price, supplied by Edmonton Opera
Mozart: Don Giovanni
sung in English
Stage Director ……………………………. Joel Ivany
Set & Costume Designer …………… Michael Gianfrancesco
Lighting Designer ……………………….Kimberly Purtell
Don Giovanni …………………………….Elliot Madore
Donna Anna……………………………….Jonelle Sills
Donna Elvira ……………………..………Andrea Núñez
Don Ottavio……………………………….John Tessier
Leporello ………………………….……….Justin Welsh
Zerlina ……………………………….……..Mireille Asselin
Masetto ……………………………….……Peter Monaghan
Commendatore …………..………..…..Ben Sieverding
Edmonton Opera Chorus
Edmonton Symphony Orchestra
Conducted by Simon Rivard
Jubilee Auditorium, Edmonton
February 1, 2024
Shortly after Don Giovanni and Leporello cavort around singing the Beatles and aping other more recent pop styles in Edmonton Opera’s production of what they called Don Giovanni, which opened at the Jubilee Auditorium on February 1st, Don Giovanni looks around at the audience, and says “This is Mozart”.
No, it wasn’t Mozart.
What is was was the commandeering of Mozart by Joel Ivany, Edmonton Opera’s Artistic Director, and director and librettist of this production. And if there was any doubt about it, the Edmonton Opera’s program booklet listed the opera as “music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, libretto by Joel Ivany”.
The music in the two-hour plus intermission show was indeed by Mozart – apart from that Beatles-led moment – and the characters and the basis of the plot were borrowed from his opera, but this show – a much better word than opera in this case – was built around the completely re-written words (sung in English), and to a certain extent, story, by Ivany.
Da Ponte, reposing in his grave in the Calvary Cemetery in New York, would have been relieved that his name was left out of that Edmonton Opera heading. For the genius of Da Ponte was to write librettos that plumb the depth of human emotions, brilliantly mixing humour with tragedy, wit with deep emotions, and in doing so bringing out the genius in Mozart the opera composer. And Don Giovanni is the most complex, the richest, and the most equivocal of their collaborations.
This show, however, has, seemingly intentionally, eschewed character development and character depth. It has no real plot to speak of (it is supposedly set in Edmonton and St. Albert), little theatrical tension, and apparently no message whatsoever. What it does have is a text that is designed to make the audience laugh, and laugh almost constantly.
And laugh the audience did, at almost everything, for even when something serious was going on, there was usually some action to the side or back of the stage to cause the laughter. And it has to be said that on this level, Ivany’s production works brilliantly. It is fast paced, has some excellent gags, is generally well sung, and the rather puerile verbal jokes – many revolving around the internet, with Donna Evira (Andrea Núñez) texting with Don Giovanni (Elliot Madore), references to TikTok, and the catalogue song sung about internet followers and conquests – were clearly enjoyed by the audience. Madore presents Don Giovanni himself as a kind of shallow swell, untroubled at the end (where there is a suggestion that what has happened is a cocaine-induced dream, with Don Giovanni unchanged).
But what was it all for? It wasn’t ‘director’s opera’, for ‘director’s opera’ seeks to reinterpret the staging of operas to bring out new depths to traditional opera, and at its best can do so marvellously. This, in contrast, sought to strip traditional opera of any depth except that of laughter. Such pure comic entertainment is, of course, more than valid, but it isn’t Mozart, especially in an opera that was was very well summed up by Michael Griffel, chair of the Julliard’s music history department: “a dark, violent, and supernatural drama that is camouflaged by its comedic characters and situations.”
A cynic would say that this production’s message was quite simple: it was about money. Opera needs new audiences, and how better to get them in than having a show built around what young people know the best – TikTok and the internet – and fooling the oldies into coming, thinking they are going to see the old warhorse of a Mozart opera. Make them all laugh and not have to worry about anything challenging, so they will go away happy. Fair enough, but the worse thing about that is that newcomers will think this is what opera is like, and what Mozart is all about, while – a cynic might say – the oldies will continue to come anyway, for it is a social occasion as much as a musical one for them.
I suspect, though that there is more to this than merely the clink of coin and new audiences. What Ivany has succeeded in doing – wittingly or unwittingly – is to make the audience laugh at main-stream opera itself – the very idea of opera. Mozart’s opera is shown as something anachronistic, that can be redeemed only by turning it into farce, akin to the old music hall, the original depiction of the human condition so out of date that to enjoy it we have to strip it of anything serious, and go just for the entertainment.
That may, of course, be true. But nonetheless, in deciding modern Edmonton audiences can only take opera if it is reduced to the simplest entertainments, this production, by making audiences laugh at opera itself, is actually creating a spectacle of audience unwittingly laughing at themselves. After all, they have come for the ‘Opera’.
Perhaps none of this might matter – the audiences really seemed to enjoy it, and it may be me that is the person out of touch with the times – except for one inescapable facet of Ivany’s creation.
It is absolutely clear that both Mozart and Da Ponte, while depicting the charm of the title character, are adamant in showing the dark side of his actions. Yes, Leporello’ s catalogue aria is indeed funny, but no audience, in either 1787 or 2024, can fail to realize that underneath the light-hearted laughter is something much darker and much more horrible. The tragedy of Donna Elvia and the rape-seduction of Zerlina (here presented by Mirielle Asselin as a middle-class character, rather than peasant-working class) shows that. So does the great swing of Mozart’s opera away from the light-hearted to what can be genuinely terrifying at the end, as Don Giovanni refuses to repent – no Faust-like saving for him – and we hear his terrified screams as he is carried away to hell.
Turning Leporello’ s aria into one of internet conquests seems very funny, but is it really? It is suggesting that Don Giovanni is not just a seducer, but that most terrifying of men, an internet stalker selecting his victims from the cloud. In this production we have a man who seduces and rapes, but the whole thing is presented as hilariously funny – and the audience laugh away. That might not matter so much if the ending showed Don Giovanni for what he is. It doesn’t. On the contrary, as he gets up at the end and joins the other characters and the chorus, he is clearly being presented as rehabilitated – after all, it was the cocaine, wasn’t it? As someone said to me after the performance, “I wonder what someone who has been raped or sexually abused would think watching this production.” Just to toss the whole thing off as a bit of entertaining fluff doesn’t cut it in this age of MeToo, however much Ivany attempted to elide past it in his message in the program booklet.
All that said, a few words about the production itself. Operabase, that invaluable web site listing almost every opera production in the world, called this production semi-staged, but it didn’t really feel like that. The orchestra were on stage, a row of chairs behind them sometimes occupied by the chorus or the occasional principal, and the main action on the stage space in front of them. There was enough of this action to create the sense of full staging, and this production certainly didn’t need complex sets.
The placing of the orchestra on stage did cause a few problems: the principals had only two small monitors on which to see the conductor, and the orchestra and soloists were occasionally out of sync. It was also noticeable that without the amplifying effect of the pit, the orchestral sound was rather swallowed up in the vastness of the Jubilee. Simon Rivard’s conducting was thoroughly precise and efficient but somewhat sterile – the dynamic range seemed to remain at a consistent mf, apart from a couple of incisive chords around the Commendatore’ s reentry, and there was no sense of bringing forward solo instruments. It rather reminded me of a Palm Court orchestra playing to a crowded tea room, but this may have been intentional. Combined with the Jubilee cavern effect, the orchestra was very much accompanying rather than contributing, throwing forward the solo voices, and in doing so emphasizing the words that were so crucial to this production’s affect.
The all-Canadian cast made the most of the style of production, both vocally and in acting, with Justin Welsh as Leporello standing out on the comic acting-singing side, and Peter Monaghan giving a powerful vocal-acting performance as Masetto. A word of praise, too, for the chorus, with the men especially singing strongly in their brief appearances.
Although it may not seem it from this review, I am a great admirer of the fresh ideas that Joel Ivany is bringing to opera in general and Edmonton Opera in particular. I do not, though, think he is doing opera a service by so misrepresenting such a masterpiece as Mozart’s Don Giovanni in such a flippant fashion.
If he had given it another title (Don G?), making clear that we were not going to see Mozart and Da Ponte’s version, but something materially different spun out from it, then I would probably have written a completely different review (and enjoyed it much more). But that is not how it was billed.
Even better would have been a new comic opera commissioned precisely for the kind of humour displayed here. But therein lies the dilemma for Ivany, and indeed for much of Canadian opera. Bring in a new work (or do a production in this style of a less well-known and more appropriate opera), and you may well bring in new audiences, but the oldies won’t go. Do a more traditional production, and the new younger audiences won’t come. And financially, both are needed to keep the art form from going under.
That seems a division almost incapable of reconciliation. But if anyone can pull it off, then Ivany may well be that person. This production wasn’t it, however entertaining it was, but in going for the new there are always going to be experiments that don’t completely come off. That shouldn’t stop anyone trying.
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