Don Giovanni,
composed by W. A. Mozart,
directed by Richard Jones.
Norwegian National Opera, Oslo,
May 2018.
Don Giovanni,
composed by W. A. Mozart,
directed by Louisa Proske.
Heartbeat Opera, New York,
May 2018.
The Oslo Opera House is one of the gems of early twenty-first-century architecture, a building that, like the twentieth-century Sydney Opera House, substantially shapes the city’s public image. Designed by the local firm of Snohetta and built on what had previously been warehouse-occupied land down by the water, it rises from its surroundings like a white sail or a snowy glacier. The distinctive slanted roof, which is open to the public, functions at all hours as a kind of urban park where people can sunbathe or picnic or just take in the view. Made of white marble and white granite, the sloping surface, which appears uniform from a distance, is actually sliced across by a series of tiny, uneven steps, so that a slight rise or drop will suddenly appear beneath your feet, marked only by a shift from rough to polished granite. A fun-filled game or a malevolent trick? In either case, caution is warranted. There is a small sign at the entrance to the roof announcing that skateboards and bicycles are not allowed, and that one proceeds at one’s own risk. That, however, is clearly part of the allure in this overwhelmingly safe nation.
Inside, the decor shifts to wood and glass, with a few gestures in the direction of cracked, frozen ice on the walls of the ground-floor restrooms. Perhaps the most unusual feature, at least to American eyes, is the wide-open cloakroom. Lying just beyond the restrooms, it features row upon row of numbered hooks, all completely unattended. My own ticket, the night I was there, had Garderobe number 1304 printed on it, indicating the exact hook that was assigned to my seat. If it had been winter, rather than a seventy-degree summer night, I would have been able to hang my heavy coat there and retrieve it myself at the end of the performance, all without fear of theft.
The auditorium itself is modern in style but warmly welcoming, with slatted wooden walls, comfortable seats, terrific sightlines, and good acoustics. And the prices too are welcoming: my superb orchestra seat came to only about $70 (as opposed to the $250 or $300 it would have cost in New York or San Francisco). Yet another delightful aspect is the standard intermission procedure, when the glass doors between the indoor lobby and the harbor-side walkway are flung open, and well-dressed opera patrons mingle outside with skateboarders, parents wheeling strollers, random tourists, and teenagers on their way to a night out. Like the roof, the opera’s outdoor terrace is a public space, and there is no barrier whatsoever preventing anyone from going in or out.
In such a marvelous environment, it is particularly disappointing to encounter a production that is not good. The Don Giovanni I saw there last May was not bad in every respect: the music (conducted by Christopher Moulds) was excellent, and many of the individual voices were fine. But opera is meant to be drama as well as music, and in this case the theatrical directing was so wrongheaded as to be perverse.
The problems began as early as the overture, which the director, Richard Jones, had converted into a mimed prelude to the action. Accompanied by the ever-faithful Leporello, Don Giovanni stood watching as a series of women streamed by; then he lured each one behind a closed door for a ten-second fling. The penultimate person in the passing parade was a man, and he too got quickly serviced—as if to suggest that the Don’s sexuality was omnivorous, and therefore genderless. Perhaps this kind of thing passes for humor in Britain, where Jones hails from, but it so obviously violates all the themes of the opera (not to mention the cultural traditions that gave rise to it, and which it is critiquing) that it signals an almost willful disregard for meaning.
Granted, Don Giovanni is a difficult opera to get right. Despite the glorious music, it almost always seems too long, in part because the second half is so raggedly filled with scenes of defiance, hallucination, and punishment as to seem practically unhinged. There is also the complexity of the main character, who needs to be seductive enough to attract us but also despicable enough to warrant his fate. Directors who ignore this built-in ambivalence do so at their peril, and Jones’s attempt to portray Giovanni as some kind of Wild West outlaw, complete with “Wanted” poster, certainly did not cope adequately with the problem.
But the real flaw in this production lay in the role of Leporello. I have always enjoyed this secondary character—all audiences do, in the way we enjoy Mercutio more than Romeo, or Enobarbus more than Antony, if we are honest—but not until I saw the Oslo production did I realize how firmly the whole opera rests in his hands. Jakob Bloch Jespersen, the bass-baritone who sang the role, was simply not up to the job. His voice was surprisingly weak, relative to the other singers, and his comic timing was non-existent. This made his “Catalog Aria”—the song in which Leporello counts up the lists of the Don’s conquests in each country, generally the high point of the opera’s first act—seem laborious and a bit silly. And because this Leporello was not appealing enough to garner our sympathy, the Don’s cruel offenses against him in the second act carried too little weight. We were left with an opera that was nearly devoid of emotional impact, a strange thing indeed when one considers the issues (sexual exploitation, broken hearts, death, damnation) that are at stake here.
Perhaps I was more alert to these errors because I had just seen, if not a perfect Don Giovanni—as an artwork, this one defies perfection—then something very close to it. Heartbeat Opera’s late-spring production, held in the tiny black-box theater at Baruch College in New York and directed by the inimitable Louisa Proske, was satisfyingly complicated. It was at once hilarious and distressing, moving and smart, and thanks to judicious cutting, the whole thing sped by in less than two hours.
Having attended two of Proske’s previous operas, I was familiar with how intimate they feel, so I purposely booked my $35 seat in the very first row. This proved to be as thrilling as I expected. In the inevitable party scene (there is always a party scene in her productions, if the opera will allow it), the balloons tossed around by the singers and musicians clustered around the feet of those seated in the front, and we had to kick them back into the stage area. I was close enough to see every facial expression and hear every muttered aside—but then, so was everyone else in this 200-seat theater. I live in fear that Proske’s directorial brilliance will someday elevate her to the ranks of the Met, where her canny ability to conjure small miracles out of nearly invisible resources will be wasted in that vast and impersonal space.
One resource Proske does visibly have, already, is the talent of her collaborators. This includes not just the musicians, who, under the passionate and intelligent directorship of Jacob Ashworth and Daniel Schlosberg, are able to make seven instruments stand in for seventy. It also includes the freelance actor-singers she hires anew for every show. There was not a dud in the bunch this time, and even the tiny roles (Zina Ellis as Gianotta, Parker Drown as the “Party Dude”) were played with verve and strength. Felicia Moore, as the buxom Donna Elvira, and Barrington Lee, as the Commendatore, were particularly notable for their strong voices, and Matthew Gamble made a wildly amusing, deeply sympathetic Leporello. But the inevitable star of the show—and the only singer, it turns out, who is part of Heartbeat’s regular crew—was the man who played the title role, John Taylor Ward.
Tall, gangly, and thin almost to the point of an Egon Schiele self-portrait, Ward looked at first a bit too strange for the role—as if Ziggy Stardust, say, had suddenly been thrown into the part of Hamlet. But his coolness, his wit, and his malleable expressiveness, not to mention his terrific voice and utterly audible diction, soon persuaded me he was exactly right for the part. This was a Don Giovanni who won us over by making both vice and viciousness seem like huge fun, even as they never ceased being destructive. I was almost worried his characterization had been pushed too far, in that I had never seen such a mean Don coming out so early in the opera. Normally we get to like him with relatively little interference for the first half; then we are supposed to turn around and despise him during the second. Proske, however, turned this tradition on its head. After alternately laughing at and resisting his cruel pranks during the whole first act, we were invited, as it were, inside his mind during the second, where his complete victimization also became ours.
Proske’s most inventive move was to set the second act in a mental hospital, where Don Giovanni was confined for his aberrant behavior. This made sense, for once, of the jagged juxtapositions of scenes, which now got acted out as a sequential series of encounters between the entrapped Don (often alone in his cell, unless he was undergoing some medical test) and everyone else (the friends, family, and medical personnel assembled out in the waiting room). Ward’s elongated anatomy got full play here, since he was stripped down to near-nakedness. In some sequences his splayed arms and stretched-out legs even suggested a crucifixion, which is probably how the character would have perceived his punishing experiences. The sanatorium setting also explained the ghostly return of the Commendatore, who here was clearly a figment of the Don’s fevered imagination, embodied by one of the doctors taking care of him.
Everything that is generally messy and unrealistic about the second half of the opera became useful in this new context. One of the things this production managed to exploit fully was our ambivalence toward the main character, because when someone is demonstrably out of his mind, it is possible to be at once sympathetic and angry with him. I left Proske’s Don Giovanni feeling both shattered and strangely fulfilled, having been asked to contemplate, and indeed take some responsibility for, the prospect of an otherwise contemptible guy getting a raw deal. Justice veering off into revenge is never a pretty sight, and it’s always worth being reminded of that, even—or especially—now.
Wendy Lesser, the editor of The Threepenny Review, is the author of one novel and eleven books of nonfiction, most recently You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn and Jerome Robbins: A Life in Dance.
