Excessively incoherent or incoherently excessive?

[muckefuck]

Normally, when I seen an opera, the only person to get a full breakdown is monshu since, though he loves them, he very rarely accompanies me. I'll talk through some aspects with Nuphy and whoever else I run into at intermission, but that's about it. Talking something through is a good thing in that it helps solidify my thinking, which makes it easier to do a write-up. But too much of it and I tend to lose the will to compose an entry. I did so much talking about the Lyric's Don Giovanni over the weekend that I'm weary of it. Nevertheless, I still intended to do an entry yesterday evening, but the time I'd set aside for that got taken up by a reprise of my breakdown to Nuphy over the phone. Uncharacteristically, he did something I think he's done that at most twice before in all the time I've known him: he bailed halfway through. That's how much he hated Robert Falls' staging.

I think he was a victim of his expectations. I don't know Falls from Adam, so I had none. The Lyric doesn't have a great track record with original productions. Being a staid institution, they favour conservative ones. Often when a director does try a novel take, it seems they fail to think things through completely, creating a muddle. So I wasn't the least bit surprised to see that happen here. The coat check clerk called the production "crazy". I've been favouring the term "incoherent". To give you an idea: Before we went, Nuphy told me what the setting was, and I remember being intrigued by it. At the end of Act I, I turned to him and asked, "When was this set again?"

In Falls' notes, he said he was attracted to the period because it had a distinct lower, middle, and upper class. To underline this, he dresses the principles like urban playboys and the peasants like Andalusian villagers. I legitimately wondered if Lyric had sought to economise by simply borrowing the costumes from another production with a 19th-century setting. And just about the only thing in the entire production which says "Spain" to me is the mantilla worn by Donna Anna when she's in mourning.

"But she's in mourning for most of the opera, isn't she?" Yes, but it's easy to get confused given the number of costume changes. Those together with the crazy number of light cues (I counted more than a dozen in a single chapel scene alone) really mess with the chronology. Traditionally, it's considered to take place over the course of a day and a night, or sometimes a day and two nights. Hard to say what the intention is here: it's dark, then it's bright, then dark again. At the Don's party, his enemies are wearing garish fancy dress; in the very next scene, they've all changed back to what they had on before. Don Ottavio wears uniforms of two different colours for no discernible reason. When the Commendatore comes to diner, Leporello is suddenly clad in outlandish livery, like something from a Hollywood club.

If I had to choose another word to sum up the production, it would be "excessive". There's too much of everything. A whole cart of flowers for the wedding scene. The huge ornate metal coffin for the Commendatore (which somehow requires two fewer pallbearers than the number of people required to remove the actual corpse in the opening scene) groans under the weight of them. Later, Leporello has to climb an entire mountain of floral arrangements to read the inscription on the statue in the cemetery. It's like Lyric kept throwing money into the production budget until it attained a fitting grandeur for their 60th anniversary gala. (A similar lack of restraint was on display in the main lobby.)

Which would all be fine, of course, if it made some sense. But too often it felt at cross purposes. The scene outside the Don's villa, for instance, is dominated by tremendous shrubberies. Yet when Masetto decides to hide in order to spy on him he goes downstage left where there's nothing at all and ends up tucking himself behind the proscenium arch. As ornate as her father's coffin is, it doesn't seem to draw the attention of Donna Anna until her aria requires it to. When it's not undercutting the action, this excess is underlining it to an almost insulting degree. In the penultimate scene, just in case you hadn't yet figure out what a total prick Don Giovanni is, Falls has him pelt Dona Elvira with food before dumping a carafe on her. It made me feel so sorry for Martínez, who deserved better than that after her terrific vocal performance.

I could go on and on--really, most of the reason I avoided writing this entry was that I didn't want it to be nothing more than a laundry list of complaints. On the plus side, the vocal performances were terrific. Silvestrelli killed in the last scene (and then was hustled off stage so anticlimatically that I completely missed his exit). Kwiecien and Rebeka were fantastic, as was Ketelsen despite a few opening-night problems keeping in synch with the orchestra. Davis robbed the music of dramatic punch, but otherwise didn't mess it up badly.

It was simply hard to concentrate on what was working with all the distractions. The best explanation I heard for the stage business of the second half was, "Do you think they were high as kites?" (The Don is shown sniffing something from a small bag at various moments, and at least once offering some to Leporello; I took it for snuff, but given the period it's quite likely it was intended to be cocaine.) I spent most of a scene trying to figure out whether a half-naked bound figure lying stage left was unconscious, dead, or merely metaphorical.

All in all, a memorable experience, but not a transcendent one. The crowd felt like an extension of the spectacle. Nuphy and I actually ended up on the edge of the red carpet trying to flog our herniaed seatmate's ticket and given ample opportunity to photobomb glitterati in our Obama jeans and off-the-rack finery. Quite a few of them must've been first time opera-goers judging from the surge of applause which cut off the end of one of the most famous arias in all of Mozart. I do have to wonder, given the production, how many of them will ever be coming back.

Comments

[bunj.livejournal.com]

Interesting symmetry: you saw the first performance, I saw the last one. I can't say that much changed between the two: the singing was fantastic, even if Davis' direction was turgid. The staging was still a mess (including Silvastrelli crawling across the stage in the first scene so he could die at his proper mark). I, too, was intrigued by the setting. They could have really done something with the tension between the conservatives and the liberals in Spain in the 20s, but, of course they didn't. In my head, I turned Ottavio into a proto-Fascist just to make his character more interesting (not helped by Poli's wooden performance). It all seemed to be so they could put Kwiecien in a tailcoat.