Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte | Don Giovanni / 2012

bad day on the seville streets

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (composer), Lorenzo Da Ponte (libretto), Don Giovanni / Los Angeles, LAOpera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Sunday, September 30, 2012

 

There is not much left to be said about Mozart’s masterwork, Don Giovanni; and it seems almost pointless to attempt to write, accordingly, about the opera. But one thing struck me in this story about a very “bad” day in the life of Don Giovanni (Ildebrando D’Arcangelo) while I watching the LAOpera version the other afternoon: except for a very few important scenes, this wealthy citizen of the upper class spends most of his time, like a vagabond, on the city streets. One might almost describe the opera, metaphorically, as being like an intense Western, wherein the hero’s luck has changed, as in a work like Bad Day at Black Rock, where everything seems to be going against the already maimed man.

      Of course, Don Giovanni is not really a hero. He begins by attempting to rape Donna Anna (Julianna Di Giacomo), who—either out of a desire to have him finish the job or to out the villain to others, we do not know which—tries to hold the man close to her, as if the victim cannot release herself from the offender. When her father, the Commendatore (Ievgen Orlov) comes to her rescue, dueling with the ruffian, Don Giovanni kills him. From that moment on Don Giovanni is doomed to remain on the streets, for the most part, on the run for his actions—while still absurdly attempting to seduce each woman he encounters along the way.

     Because his life is so public, it is easy for his ex-wife, the furious Donna Elvira (Soile Isokoski) to find him. She is the very first person, in fact, he encounters along his spiraling path down to hell. Donna Elvira is both a significant force against him—revealing Giovanni’s horrible deeds to anyone who might listen—and a of kind comic figure, a specter appearing long before the Commendatore’s final ghostly manifestation, that haunts him wherever he goes, as well as foiling his attempts to seduce Zerlina (Roxana Constantinescu) and her maid.

     Twice during the long day on the road, however, Giovanni does return to his palatial estate, the first time to join in a drunken party he has ordered up so that he might get the men out of the way in order to bed Zerlina. Yet the sober if oafishly jealous Masetto stands in his way, while Zerlina herself—if at first all too ready to surrender to Giovanni’s seductions—remains steadfast in her love for Masetto.

     Again Giovanni takes to the street, this time, dressed as his servant Leporello, pretending to participate in a mad chase while really trying to save his own life. As the sun begins to sink, we still find him in a public space, this time in the cemetery where he encounters the Commendatore’s horrifying talking statue whom he flippantly invites to dinner.     

      While Giovanni is at risk for most of day upon the streets, it is in his own home, as he sits down for a lonely dinner—even now torturing Leporello—where he is finally “captured” and brought to justice through the visitation of the Commendatore’s figuration.

      Hell, strangely enough (at least in the LAOpera version, based on the Lyric Opera of Chicago production) manifests itself in Giovanni’s own dining room, not in the public square, suggesting that it is Giovanni’s own private hell, not a spectacle of public proportions; only Leporello observes this event

      Giovanni’s punishment, however, has resulted from all his public crimes, from his inability to remain alone but for but a few moments each day. It is almost as if Giovanni will not even sleep, so determined is he to seek out and find new prey. If the final show-down occurs out of the public eye, it is only because Giovanni is most vulnerable in his own house, since it is public transgressions that truly define who he is. A villainous gunslinger cannot play that role in a lonely farmhouse, just as a lascivious seducer cannot act out his identity in an empty estate. If the particular day Mozart and Da Ponte show us is the worst day of Giovanni’s life, it is—except for his murder of the Commendatore and his inability to seduce anyone—not much different from any other day; for Giovanni is a man doomed to roam Seville’s public streets and squares instead of enjoying the private pleasures of a wealthy life.

 

Los Angeles, October 4, 2012.

Reprinted from Green Integer Review (October 2012).     

  

  

Joseph Stein and Stan Daniels | Enter Laughing / 2015

moving on down

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Stein (book, based on the novel by Carl Reiner), Stan Daniels (music and lyrics) Enter Laughing / Lovelace Studio Theater, at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Beverly Hills, California. The performance Howard Fox and I attended was a matinee on March 1, 2015.

 

What a vast difference 132 blocks makes in a life, more or less, proclaims the musical, Enter Laughing—based on the novel by Carl Reiner, the play by Joseph Stein, the film by Reiner and Stein, and the 1976 musical flop, So Long, 174th Street—concerned with the near-impossible transition from a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx to the symbolic center of Broadway theater, 42nd Street. Fortunately, this newly down-sized version of the Broadway work, with music and lyrics by long-time Reiner friend Stan Daniels, takes the whole issue with a great deal of self-parody; a bit like director Stuart Ross’ Forever Plaid, Enter Laughing: The Musical portrays itself as a fun-loving near amateur production—however professional and gifted are the members of the cast and accompanying musicians.

      In the many ways this musical plays with serious theatrical and its own conventions, the audience is permitted to enjoy what becomes a (excuse the ridiculous pun in the style of the play’s humor) shalom-y-on-wry skit—an ingratiatingly witty genuflection to theater—without demanding any of serious Broadway musical’s pheasant and champagne excesses. Presenting itself as something close to pure Borscht-belt comedy, this production allows us to sit back and heartily laugh at the exaggerated caricatures it presents us without a tinge of guilt. Well, not without guilt exactly, but certainly without worry about whether or not we should allow ourselves to giggle over David Kolowitz’s aggrandizement of self and his sexual appetites as he clumsily negotiates his way out of becoming his mother’s favorite druggist son.

     Kolowitz (Noah Weisberg) hasn’t a clue—or even cue—of how to act, let alone of what theater is about; all he knows is that he loves it, and is willing to do nearly anything to pursue a career in what imagines is a quick ascent to the top where he might live out his sexual fantasies with fellow movie stars such as Dolores Del Rio, Jean Harlow, and….every film goddess of late 1930s and 1940s, the affairs of which his imaginary butler (Nick Ullett) raunchily sings (in John Gielgud-like waspish propriety) in “The Butler’s Song.”

     Once in the hands of con-man Harrison Marlowe (also Ullett) and his nymphomaniac daughter, Angela (Amy Pietz), however, David is brought down to earth with a crash, forced to pay to perform and asked to shell out $10 (a fortune is those days) for a tuxedo in which to flaunt his acting failures. Some of the most wonderful comic moments in the musical occur while David attempts to strut the stage, leaping, flouncing, creeping, running, and collapsing in time to his ridiculous rhythms of David’s Ronald Coleman-like patter. He’s so bad that even Marlowe, the loquaciously rotten wordsmith behind the ridiculous farce in which David is trapped, is left speechless; but Angela is hot to trot with the man of her “dreams” (after all, she sings, he has a mouth, a chin, two eyes, some toes, and a nose). 

     But meanwhile, back in the coldwater flat, trouble is brewing. Mom (Anne Desalvo) and Dad (Robert Picardo) have no intentions of parenting an actor! David’s mother sings of her dreams of having a pharmacological goldmine, and when she fails to convince David of that avocation, pulls out all the stops of motherly guilt in “A Mother’s Heart.” Dad even takes out a loan to send his son off to school early, but secretly, with David’s employer Mr. Forman (Joel Brooks), envies the younger generation’s desire to do nothing but “Hot Cha Cha.”

     David’s promiscuous imagination, moreover, is brought down to earth with his girlfriend next door, Wanda (Sara Niemietz), who, fearing that she may be left in the lurch of David’s plans for himself, feeds him her own lines of love and normality (“It’s Like” and “Being with You”). Before long David, predictably, is confused, and, equally predictably, absolutely scared out of his wits the moment the stage lights hits his eyes; like a deer, he blinks in utter terror, recovering himself just enough to throw-out the play-with-a-play’s dreadful last lines before heading “down”—the only direction left for him—to Broadway (“So Long 174th Street”).

     It’s all been done before and far more successfully, but the Stein-Reiner version of Enter Laughing is so exuberantly sweet that there’s simply no way to hate it. Besides, under Stuart Ross’ clever direction and the tinkling piano keys of the noted accompanist Gerald Sternbach, this musical never pauses long enough to take itself seriously. Just when you might want to cry out, “Enough already,” a character beats you to the punch; when a song appears an inappropriate moment, the hero signals the singer “This isn’t the right time.” So the audience has little else to do but to sit back and laugh.

 

Los Angeles, March 3, 2015

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2015).