Redefining the Omelet: Don Giovanni @ OperaMall Millionplex 11.16.11

First allow me to disqualify myself from any valid opinions about Don Giovanni by confessing that I really liked Francisco Negrin's 2003 Glimmerglass production.  It was ugly and depressive.  The Catalogue Aria was a case study in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder illustrated by a tour through the Collected Underwear.  The revenant Commendatore was a ruse conceived by Don Ottavio to push a psychologically unstable Don Giovanni over the edge, and his manifestation in the penultimate scene was a marching, sign-waving, anti-Giovanni Occupy Seville.  As the orchestra ratcheted up the tension, our anti-hero, standing in a coffin, slashed his wrists in both defiance and despair. None of it was pretty.  Everybody hated it.

I was with an opera neophyte. I had a lot of explaining to do.

Last night, by chance, I was sitting next to another opera neophyte. I could tell she was new to all this, not just because she was telling her friend she'd never been to the opera, but because she spent the whole second act munching popcorn. People who have been to the opera, I find, generally skip the popcorn at the HDs.  Or at least they'll be likely to put it aside for the duration of Il mio tesoro. No such luck here, alas.  But she seemed nice, so while we were waiting at the end to exit our row, I turned to her and said "Did you enjoy the performance?"   "Oh yes!" she said, with genuine enthusiasm. "But are they all that long?" (Two for two! If someone says it again at Siegfried, I reserve the right to yell "Bingo!" in a crowded theater.)

Here is Michael Grandage's ideal audience member, as stated in what passes for his directorial manifesto vis a vis this production.  She's never seen it before. She had a good time. She didn't need anything explained. Win. On her right was her friend, from what I could gather also a neophyte. She also had a good time. She also didn't need anything explained. Win. On her left was some thirty years of opera experience. I've done a lot of explaining to neophytes. Here I didn't have to explain anything to anyone. Win.

 I've seen stagings that were luminous and performances that were brilliant.  I've seen workmanlike stagings and performances both.  I've seen things that were perplexing, and things that were wrong-headed and infuriating.  I've seen things that were openly disrespectful of the material they were supposed to be presenting (Mark Lamos, I'm talking to you). Like everyone else who's parked themselves in an opera house with any regularity, I've done a lot of armchair directing in my time.  Apart from a weak Commendatore -- and Commendatores are weak nine times out of ten -- and a Donna Anna who wasn't in nearly as much of a twist as she should have been, I didn't have the impulse to do any here. That was kind of refreshing. Win.

Michael Grandage hasn't, in Deborah Warner's parlance, smashed the Fabergé. That isn't what he does.  To the best of my knowledge, it has never been what he does.  Neither, in the fashion of Regietheater, has he taken the piece and used it to his own ends, plastering a concept onto it with complete disengagement from authorial intent.  As he has said elsewhere, "I'm not the kind of director who enjoys immediately looking at a time and a place set by a writer and then going 'Let's not do that.'... It's always been of interest to me to use their starting point as my starting point." Not the manifesto of a theatrical radical. Unless, of course, the scene is already full of theatrical radicals.

Grandage's modus operandi has tended to favor interiority. Not that he's only ever worked in tiny spaces but most of his work in the past ten years (Frost/Nixon, Red, Hamlet, King Lear, Luise Miller, et cetera) has been at London's Donmar Warehouse, the directorship of which he took over from Sam Mendes in 2002.  Unlike the Met's slightly-shy-of-4000-seat enormity, Donmar Warehouse is 250 seats. Its stage could fit comfortably inside the Rad Cave and still leave room for the bar.  Interiority is a luxury it can afford.  The Met, not so much.  So what's he doing there?

By now we've all read James Jorden's piece, here, where

a) he lauds Peter Gelb for innovations like the HD series, but then
b) takes him to task for enabling the dumbing down of productions by hiring directors for the sparkly shiny that the words Tony Award Winner attaches to their name.  Then he
c) gives Grandage a shelling for suggesting that there might be a preponderance of Met audience members who have never seen Don Giovanni. And of course Mr. Jorden is right...for the actual Met audience inside the actual Met building, that would be a rare demographic indeed.

But here's the thing, the same is not necessarily true of a 250 seat theater at the OperaMall Millionplex. Which brings us back to Neophyte A, and her having a really good time, and all she needed was lots of close-ups from cameras way closer to the singers than even the first row of the orchestra. Close enough to see that those were military oak leaves on the Commendatore's greatcoat, not his zombie-like exposed ribcage. Close enough to see the expressions on people's faces and the looks in their eyes and the minute gestures that will never read from the foie gras seats, let alone the chicken seats.

And this is really where Peter Gelb either is or is not a fucking genius, to use the tags of JJ's alter ego, because Grandage of the 250 seat theater plays great to 250 seat theaters full of opera neophytes, who get their opera on Hollywood terms, sung well-amplified by the thin and attractive, with popcorn and Twizzlers and half-gallon Cokes.  Who's the Met audience now?