Yes, the arrival of the statue of the Commendatore was replaced with the appearance of this giant bust and sung off-stage in this production. However, I had to give Rom credit for the pièce de resistance of the night, the towering 24-feet tall bust of Commendatore.

Personally, I found the constant use of this stage mechanism got more and more predictable and even tedious, and honestly, it made the whole performance felt merely like semi-staged. I said some, as inexplicably Cavanagh and Rom decided to place the singers right in front of the stage, with a three-piece screen divider with the silhouette of the House (adorned with tattered American flags) placed directly behind them for most of big arias and ensemble pieces it was there for Leporello’s Catalogue aria, Donna Elvira’s “Mi tradì”, the great sextet of Act 2, etc etc. In between these sides, a raised platform was placed, where some actions happened during the opera. Alas, what we ended up with was a mishmash of ideas and styles that were at odds with each other, and it grew more confusing as the opera progressed.Įrhard Rom’s mostly static set split the House into two sides with the crack in the middle, which seemed to account for the downfall of both the House and the society.

And those monsters look like us.īefore the curtain opened, I kind of expected to see some kind of Mad Max style interactions among various rogue characters in an abandoned dwelling, which in itself would have made a timely social commentary on the city where it was performed. Greed, desire, and hunger for power, without regard for the impacts on our fellow human beings, has stolen our future and loosed monsters on the world.

It is the late 2080s, a not-too-distant and not unlikely future in a now-ruined world, destroyed not by some external force but a natural one, that of human nature at its worst. Now we find ourselves in a time of finality and conclusion, when the consequences of those selfish actions have been visited on this same place, some 150 years later.

Don giovanni sf opera