"A Fresh Take on the Dirty Don"
By PAUL LEVY
WORMSLEY PARK, England—Garsington Opera kicked off its second season at Wormsley, the enormous Getty estate with its enlarged auditorium and stage, with a special Mozartian arrangement of "God Save the Queen" to mark that this was also the beginning of Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee celebrations.
Director Daniel Slater's production of "Don Giovanni," though, is more subversive. The first scene, the rape of Donna Anna, is portrayed—in a dumb show involving most of the contents of a Soho sex shop—as a sex game gone wrong.
Mike Hoban
The complicity of Anna (beautifully acted and sung by Natasha Jouhl) raises dramatic problems: it means she is cheating on Ottavio (Jesús León), which confuses the issue of her asking him to wait a year to marry. But Leslie Travers's contemporary sets and costumes made the rethink plausible.
I found this radical take on the libretto consistent and refreshing, splendidly cast, with outstanding performances by a wonderful-looking Grant Doyle as Giovanni, Joshua Bloom as Leporello, the Bevan sisters—Sophie and Mary—as Elvira and Zerlina, respectively, and Callum Thorpe as Masetto. Conductor Douglas Boyd's tempi sometimes pushed the singers to keep up with him, but the pace was bracing.
'Don Giovanni,' until July 2; 'L'Olimpiade,' until June 29; www.garsingtonopera.org
