Our Girl and I managed to do a few other things last weekend, too. For openers, we went to the Lyric Opera to see a new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni that packed all the theatrical wallop of a straight play. This kind of thing is a lot less common than you might think, and not just because so many opera singers can’t act (though that’s probably the main reason). Many opera houses are simply too big for painstakingly directed productions to register clearly, and most of today’s major-house opera directors typically opt for high-concept stagings that rely on large-scale, scenery-driven effects.
Peter Stein’s approach is different. “All the drama, all the theater, lies in the music,” Stein says of Don Giovanni, and so he’s produced the opera without any obtrusive conceptual overlay, placing his singers in the midst of Ferdinand W