‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” runs the teaser for what Boston Lyric Opera is calling its “female-focused” production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” Which is pretty furious when you consider that, at the end of the story, infernal demons drag our, uh, hero down as he exclaims, “What torture, alas, what agony!” He may even count himself fortunate that his victims in this world — Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, Zerlina, and a few thousand more — aren’t waiting for him in hell.
They are, however, waiting to upstage him at the Shubert Theatre. The idea, says Boston Lyric Opera general and artistic director Esther Nelson, is that audiences will see the libertine “from the point of view of his conquests.”
Easier said than done. For all that Don Giovanni is a liar and a scoundrel, it’s hard not to be seduced by his love of life (or at least lust), and hard not to admire his unrepentant acceptance of his fate. The women in this production — it turns out that they are waiting for him in hell — may have the last word, but Australian baritone Duncan Rock ensures that Don Giovanni will remain the star of his own show.
The opera premiered in Prague in 1787; a year later there was a production in Vienna for which Mozart made a number of changes. The Lyric is for the most part adhering to the latter version, replacing Don Ottavio’s Prague aria, “Il mio tesoro,” with the Viennese “Dalla sua pace” and adding “Mi tradí” for Donna Elvira. The Viennese second-act cuts designed to speed up the action are observed; the razor scene in which Zerlina threatens Leporello is dropped, and so is the Prague finale, in which Donna Anna makes Don Ottavio wait a year for their nuptials, Donna Elvira vows to enter a convent, and Don Giovanni’s servant, Leporello, decides to look for a better master. The production ends brutally, with Don Giovanni getting a taste of his own medicine.
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It begins bizarrely, in a green-paneled room with a balloon chandelier, a drawing in the style of Egon Schiele, a metal sculpture that seems to have been inspired by the Etruscan “Chimera of Arezzo,” and champagne bottles scattered about. Don Giovanni, it appears, is hosting a never-ending masked ball. Most of the cast are dressed in Tilly Grimes’s period outfits, but Don Ottavio sports a wristwatch and has sunglasses hanging from his vest, and village girl Zerlina eventually turns up in a striped sundress, a denim jacket, and espadrilles, accompanied by fiance Masetto in sneakers, shirt hanging out, tie, and porkpie hat.
Don Giovanni himself enters in his undershirt and a goat-horn mask, and it’s clear he’s been getting rough with Donna Anna. When her father, the Commendatore, goes at him with a cane, Don Giovanni kicks the old man to death. But that’s as far as stage director Emma Griffin goes to make him unlikable. From his fervently shaped “Là ci darem la mano” to his exuberant “Finch’han dal vino,” Rock’s Don Giovanni is a life force, comic, witty, intelligent, never mean-spirited. And his interplay with Kevin Burdette’s Leporello provides the production’s best moments. Burdette makes the most of his “Madamina” catalogue aria, and he does a hilarious impersonation of his master.
The rest is less gratifying. Meredith Hansen’s Donna Anna and Jennifer Johnson Cano’s Donna Elvira are the usual studies in high dudgeon, though Cano does have some appealingly girlish moments in the second act. John Bellemer’s Don Ottavio and David Cushing’s Masetto are the usual studies in fecklessness; Chelsea Basler’s Zerlina is a giddy, pouty teenager. The singing is all reasonably good and occasionally ravishing; there’s no faulting the orchestra led by music director David Angus. And it was a fine idea to have Steven Humes’s Commendatore appear, in the manner of Banquo’s ghost, at the end of the first act to frighten Don Giovanni. But at three hours, including one intermission, this production drags. Don Giovanni might well wonder whether hell wouldn’t be more fun.
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Mozart: Don Giovanni
Presented by Boston Lyric Opera. At: Citi Shubert Theatre, Friday. Remaining performances: May 6, 8, and 10. Tickets: $30-$153. 866-348-9738, www.blo.org
Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at jeffreymgantz@gmail.com.