Don Giovanni's spurned women run away with the show

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      A Vancouver Opera production. At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Saturday, March 1. Continues until March 9

      The sex-crazed title character in Vancouver Opera’s new Don Giovanni clearly doesn’t know a good catch when he has one: a couple of the women he spurns so badly run away with the show.

      Erin Wall’s signature role is Donna Anna (the woman whose father Giovanni slays at the top of the opera for trying to protect her honour), and it showed in the drama she commanded in “Or sai chi l’onore”. The other standout is Krisztina Szabó’s Donna Elvira, a woman repeatedly tormented by our shameless Don Juan. The fiery mezzo nailed it from the minute she promised “I’ll tear his heart out” to her polished rendition of the punishing, frantic ornamentation of “Mi tradì”.

      That’s not to say there aren’t other strengths to this production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera—so difficult to pull off, with all its farcical comings and goings, endless stream of wronged women, and extended, acrobatic arias. Adding to the complex cues here are Bob Bonniol’s projections, but they’re surprisingly unobtrusive in execution—mostly architectural triptychs spread above a modular set of stairs and platforms that houses the copious doors the opera demands. Only at the end, when Giovanni’s luxurious world of red velvet curtains and statues literally starts to melt around him and the hell fires lick up behind the unrepentant Lothario, do the video projections tap their full expressive power.

      As for our hookup-happy Giovanni, opening night’s bass-baritone Daniel Okulich brought a lithe, young, and almost vulpine sexuality to the character, especially as he cavorted in his mansion in the second act, with his long black hair, tall leather boots, and loose blouse unbuttoned to the navel. The man can act, and he’s endowed with a rich voice, although without the volume you generally crave in the role—most noticeably in his hollers as he descended into the inferno. (Brett Polegato alternates the role.)

      Volume proved to be an issue elsewhere in the opera as well. The overture’s blasts, under veteran Brit conductor Steuart Bedford, felt muted at first, the multiple threads of the challenging first-act finale became muddled, and some of Zerlina and Masetto’s (Rachel Fenlon and Aaron Durand) words got lost in the lower register. Sometimes the characters and chorus members felt far away, spread widely across a near-empty stage filled only with projected light.

      Daniel Okulitch as Don Giovanni.
      Tim Matheson

      That was not the case when our duelling Donnas appeared, of course, to command our attention. Nor was it when tenor Colin Ainsworth, as Donna Anna’s fiancé Don Ottavio, took the stage for the supremely taxing “Il mio tesoro”: he tapped its power not through loudness, but through a largo tempo and hushed, heartfelt emotion that brought the audience members to breathless silence. He also helped pull off a sparkling, beautifully modulated masked trio with Szabó and Wall near the end of Act 2, aided here by Bedford’s detail-oriented craftsmanship with the orchestra.

      On occasion, director Kelly Robinson creates some intimacy by sending characters right into the audience, whether it’s Stephen Hegedus’s Leporello (Don Giovanni’s assistant) telling us about his master’s penchant for blonds and brunettes (and finding examples in the front row), or marauding villagers with lanterns heading out into the aisles in their quest to lynch the Don. (The runway that characters cross along the front of the orchestra pit is not as successful.) There’s another, creepily cool touch in this production, too: the ghostlike, balloon-skirted harlots who seem to linger in every corner and alleyway that Giovanni passes—reappearing for his day of reckoning.

      In all, there is at least enough heavenly talent and imagery in this rendition to keep Mozart’s challenging, epic morality tale from, well, going to hell.

      Brett Polegato, Leslie Ann Bradley, and Rachel Fenlon.
      Tim Matheson
      Leslie Ann Bradley as Donna Elvira.
      Tim Matheson

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