Review | Trumping the Don

I don’t think I was the only one in The Granada Theatre during the Music Academy of the West’s summer grand opera project with the thought that a 2025 production of Mozart’s masterpiece opera could be subtitled “Don Trump Giovanni.” Here, after all, we have in librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte’s tale, a central character who is essentially an unapologetically narcissistic, power-mad seducer-rapist who somehow evades the wages of his rampant and convicted criminality. Hm, sounds like someone we know and hear about daily.

Trump’s brash Teflon-coated resistance to justice served seemed to be stated in Giovanni’s cocky comment at the end of Act One: “Even if the world shall fall, nothing frightens me.” Eventually, comeuppance and ghostly vengeance prevail. For Don G., that is.

Propitious timing notwithstanding, it was high time that Don Giovanni, one of the uncontestably great operas in the standard opera canon (perhaps the greatest), paid a return visit to Santa Barbara, after last having been staged by Opera Santa Barbara a decade ago. Advance word that the Music Academy would take it on as this summer’s annual fully staged opera project was welcome news. Even more welcome: a production exceeding our already high expectations. 

This was a production where everything was in place, on a high order, and the overall impression given was that we had before us the fruits of a fully professional opera company, with vocal talent of stature. From the overture onward, conductor Christian Reif led the willing and ready musicians in the Academy Festival Orchestra with a sure-handed sound and approach from the orchestra pit. 

Scenic designer Charlie Corcoran worked resourcefully and effectively within a necessarily limited budget, with subtle suggestions of director Mo Zhou’s re-staging of the 18th century opera in the glitzy and morally corrupt landscape of ‘30s Hollywood. A painted backdrop offering a pictorial suggestion of a village scene and the fourth wall wink of cast members helping to move set pieces and props synced up with the artifice-geared realm of the movies. 

For this Don, aside from the eerie contemporary relevance of its current presidential proximity, director Zhou logically tapped into the world of “casting couch” paradigm, Columbia Pictures founder Harry Cohn, the doppelgänger character embodied here by the Don. (It helped, too, that the tall and aptly seductive/sinister-voiced Don here, Joshua James Klein, resembles another anti-heroic rake, Don Draper, of TV’s Mad Men fame.)

Zhou’s film-referential contextualization makes this production the second such opera/cinema worldly combination in Santa Barbara this year, following Opera Santa Barbara’s setting of Pagliacci in the Italian neo-realist film world last fall. Film and opera make for logical cultural kinships, in terms of the multi-sensory nature of the media, and, yes, the moral queasiness sometimes embedded in operatic and cinematic narratives and real-life dimensions. 

However dire and dour the scheming and justice-dodging antics of the Don gets over the opera’s two-act trajectory, moments of dark comedy deflect the moral muck. More importantly, Mozart’s timelessly potent musical score reigns supreme, transcending the narrative specifics and drawing us into its sublime folds. 

Among the highlights of the many arias of note along its two-act trajectory were Leporello’s famed “Madamina il catalogo e questo,” richly delivered by Georgian-born bass Irakli Pkhaladze and Donna Anna’s “Or sai chi l’onore,” a pivotal aria from Act 2, passionately rendered by soprano Xinshu Li. Other singers shone in their apt and respective roles, including Joshua Berg as Don Ottavio, Emily Margevich as Donna Elvira, and Ruoxi Peng’s Zerlina. The vocal heft and nuance generally encountered here affirms again the world-renowned caliber of the Music Academy’s Voice Program. Opera fans and the neophyte opera curious are lucky to have this program in town each summer. 

In all, this Don Giovanni, one of the finest overall Academy productions in recent years, amounted to a profound achievement which, incidentally, snuck in a painful reminder of present-day White Housed putrescence and danger, far beyond the escape zone of the opera house.