Opera Philadelphia presents Mozart’s Don Giovanni

Affordable prices introduced audiences to adventurous new work (Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s The Listeners) and a rediscovered rarity (The Anonymous Lover by the Chevalier de Saint-Georges), but staples of the bread-and-butter repertory will be needed to attract attendees with more centrist tastes. Mozart’s masterpiece needs little introduction or help selling tickets, but the new production overseen by director Alison Moritz lacks a strong point of view for this complex, often unsettling music drama.

Comedy, speed, and style

How do you best present Don Giovanni in 2025? Despite its popularity, it’s not an easy work to digest, and its veneration of an anti-hero who mistreats nearly everyone in his path might seem unsavory to modern viewers. Sure, the Don gets his comeuppance in the end, but Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte allow him a lot of nasty fun along the way.

In fact, that uncomfortable rancor is one of the opera’s beauties. Rather than directly moralizing, Mozart and Da Ponte created a seductive villain, one for whom the audience swoons, and then leaves the spectator to grapple with the reasons they’re drawn to such a pest. That level of intricacy is a chief reason this opera has endured for more than 200 years.

Playing the action at racing speed, Moritz’s production often leans too heavily into the comedy, presenting not only Giovanni but all the characters as buffoonish stereotypes. The conceit provokes easy laughs, but they come at the expense of the story’s deeper motives, sanding out the sharper edges. The mise en scène provides little visual point of view, with unit sets by Cassandre Griffin and Jesse Wine dominated by hulking staircases and a chaise longue that resembles a hand. Circular white orbs occasionally festoon the stage for no discernable reason.

Victoria Bek delivers stylish costumes for most of the performers, although some of the chorus get the short end of the stick with regrettable visual gags. Male choristers show up in one scene wearing black robes and Halloween masks reminiscent of the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut; in another, they wear Styrofoam blocks of granite on their heads, a vague reference to the libretto. Jeanette Yew’s striking lighting design is the production’s one triumph; it would have been as memorable illuminating a bare stage.

The pitfalls of fast tempi

On opening night, conductor Corrado Rovaris took the score at such a brisk clip that it bulldozed transitional moments and sometimes eroded coordination among the singers. Rovaris has long favored fast tempi, often eliciting exciting results, but here it felt too frenetic. The Opera Philadelphia Orchestra coped admirably, but it was not a performance that will stand out in memory for musical detail.

Voices of this Don Giovanni

The American baritone Sidney Outlaw jumped into the title role just this week, when the originally announced Don Giovanni withdrew due to illness. He deserves commendation for pulling together a credible interpretation on short notice, although his Don occasionally lacks the character’s signature seductive draw. Outlaw possesses a lovely, lyric instrument that would do well in Baroque repertoire, although I tend to like a bit more oomph in the sound for this role.

As Don Giovanni’s wily sidekick Leporello, Nicholas Newton sings expressively and finds a welcome balance of swagger and desperation. Olivia Smith deftly handles the florid runs of Donna Anna’s aria “Non mi dir” despite some spread at the top of her voice. Academy of Vocal Arts graduate Kevin Godínez makes a pleasing debut as Masetto, and Amanda Sheriff acts zestily as his bride Zerlina, her winning persona offsetting a rather ordinary voice. Veteran bass Raymond Aceto cuts a commanding figure as the Commendatore but sounds woolly.

The evening’s best singing comes from Khanyiso Gwenxane as Don Ottavio and Elizabeth Reiter as Donna Elvira. A shame, then, that the production cuts the two wonderful arias that Mozart wrote for the Vienna premiere of the score, which have become standard in most editions: “Dalla sua pace” and “Mi tradì quell’alma ingrata” respectively.

Future excitement

After so much outside-the-box thinking from Opera Philadelphia, this Don Giovanni cannot help but feel disappointing. The company’s newly announced 2025-26 season, which leans heavily toward new work, promises more excitement.

Advance tickets for all remaining performances of Don Giovanni are sold out, but $10 rush tickets will be available at the Academy of Music box office beginning two hours prior to curtain.