Saw the COC's Don Giovanni whilst in Toronto and honestly, it was one of the low points of my vacation. You know the climax of that opera? When the rake is confronted by the stone statue of the man he killed, and the stone statue demands he repent, and the rake refuses, and then gets dragged off to hell? You're quite likely to know it, rather likelier to know it than the climax to most operas, both because Donny G is awfully famous and because it was featured in Amadeus, as the thing that showed Salieri how to get to Mozart.
Anyways. The COC staging was repellent. They'd obviously broken the bank on War and Peace, which my opera boyfriend told me had actual trench digging in it, so they staged the ending cheap, as a conspiracy to scare Donny G to death by the other characters. The timing was thoughtless; the character had just plowed through a massive dinner so it looked like he died of indigestion. Holy. Fuck. COC. People notice when you cut corners. You're not a businesswoman who can get away with picking up a new blazer at Winners from time to time. You're a fucking opera company staging fucking operas. If you can't show Donny G getting carried off to hell, don't show Donny G.
All that having been said, the actual singing was charming, Donny G looked like a peice of ass, and Zerlina and Masetto were delightful. I did enjoy it, after all. Obviously. It's a great opera. But the only thing I got out of it that I wouldn't have got out of listening to a CD at my opera boyfriend's swanky new condo on the Esplanade was a sense of vertigo from sitting at the fifth ring railing.
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento