In this reinvented work, which is punctuated by Mozart’s sublime melodies minus the recitative, Molière’s louche, aging Don Juan and his hyperactive sidekick/servant encounter Mozart’s younger libertine and his valet at a drive-in movie. Actually, Mozart’s characters are the drive-in movie, the opera’s initial scuffle among Don Giovanni, Donna Anna, and her father, the Commendatore, played out both on stage and on an upstage screen as Don Giovanni flees an attempted seduction and is pursued by the avenging dad — who is accidentally bumped off by the Plymouth and hauled away on a gurney. Needing a means of escape, Don Giovanni and Leporello hop into the car, causing Sganarelle no little trepidation until Leporello’s catalogue of his master’s conquests (“Madamina, il catalogo è questo”) convinces him that the encounter is “like meeting long-lost cousins.” I question whether you can take the iconic seducer — who has been singular for 700 years — and double his pleasure without diluting the myth of Don Juan. But that’s a given here. It also goes without saying that the surtitles (credited to Epp) that accompany the music, sung mostly in Italian, are not lifted straight from Lorenzo da Ponte, who doubtless did not write, “In France, all the woman are doable,” or refer to “desperate housewives.”
In its structure, DJG follows the more episodic Don Juan, with one of the French play’s country wenches, Charlotte, doing double duty as Zerlina, the peasant girl seduced by Don Giovanni (“Là ci darem la mano,” here removed to the back seat of the car, Christina Baldwin’s crystalline high notes motivated by the activity taking place beneath her skirt). A hapless gas-station attendant named Peter stands in for a number of Molière’s minor characters as well as for Masetto, the peasant who loves Zerlina. And, boy, does this guy — though he’s the one left in the dust by the Plymouth, often having been walloped by a car door — get taken for a ride. Here, as elsewhere, the physical comedy undertaken by Jeune Lune is brutally convincing. Thus it is to Dieter Bierbrauer’s battered Peter that Baldwin’s breezy Charlotte, dismounting from her bike, croons Zerlina’s poignant aria of comfort, “Vedrai, carino.” Also touching is Bierbrauer’s rendition of the abandoned Peter’s lament (“Dalla sua pace”).
Meanwhile, Don Juan is pursued by his abandoned wife, Elvire (Jennifer Baldwin Peden, borrowing Donna Elvira’s “Ah! Chi mi dice mai”), and Don Giovanni (Bryan Boyce) is chased by the dishonored and pissed-off Donna Anna (Momoko Tanno). Mozart’s Don Ottavio is MIA, with the show’s formidable trio of women (actually there’s a fourth, labeled “Girl,” who serves mostly musical purposes) out to avenge their own wrongs, thank you very much. There is even a hint of Thelma & Louise toward the chaotic end of the first act.
