REVIEW: Don Giovanni @ Severance Hall 3/22/11
A little opera postscript:
As we know, “suspension of disbelief” is often essential to enjoying a show. For example, in Stomp, a delightful blend of sound, dance, and humor that played recently at the Palace Theatre, we had to assume that the little sad fellow who didn’t ever get it quite right really didn’t know he was funny. And at first, I was doing very well in suspending disbelief while watching the Cleveland Orchestra’s recent production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. It was the original Zurich production conducted by Franz Welser-Most both there and here.
I got that the fabulous Verb Ballet dancers were props and not people most of the time, I understood the updated costumes and settings and I even got (and appreciated) the Euro-trash vibe that director Sven-Eric Bechtolf is celebrated for. And yes, the soloists and the Cleveland Orchestra made beautiful music.
But what did not work was the tiny African statue that was supposed to replace the spirit of Don Giovanni’s murder victim. The opera begins with the bloody scene where the fleeing Don Giovanni kills his intended rape victim’s father. No excuse for such bad behavior and we know he’s going to Hell [whether we believe in Hell or not] for that, if for all the heartless seductions (after all, the women chase him so maybe it’s not all his fault). But does he go to Hell? No, he sees no avenging statue of his victim come to life; instead he sees a 3-foot brown carved figurine that vaguely resembles an African sculpture (though not nearly as scary as the real Witch Doctor pieces shown last year at the Cleveland Museum of Art).
And instead of going screaming down to Hell with great harsh brass notes of tragedy, he wiggles around on the stage having a heart attack. Well, of course he would have a heart attack (given the recent CNN story that people are most vulnerable to heart attacks within the two-hour period after having sex and our hero had lots of that the night before). Ick. Didn’t work for me. Open the pit, drag him screaming down to sit beside the woodwinds. Of course, it’s OK to add a bit of humor — as Opera Cleveland did with the Don rising up from said pit at the very end draped with glam gals and reminding us of Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick — but the guy’s got to go to Hell with a capital H, not just have a heart attack.
Maybe what happens in Zurich should stay in Zurich.
[Photo by Roger Mastroianni]
Laura Kennelly is a freelance arts journalist, a member of the Music Critics Association of North America, and an associate editor of BACH, a scholarly journal devoted to J. S. Bach and his circle.
Listening to and learning more about music has been a life-long passion. She knows there’s no better place to do that than the Cleveland area.
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