Don Giovanni

About the Production

The open-air theater at Santa Fe offered an extraordinary opportunity: to stage Don Giovanni against an actual sky, where the supernatural machinery of the opera's finale could meet the vast New Mexico dark. The Commendatore's return from the dead is rendered here not as theatrical spectacle but as elemental fact.

This is an opera that asks us to laugh at a serial predator. We chose not to resolve that discomfort but to make it the production's subject. The audience's complicity in enjoying Giovanni's wit is examined directly.

Directorial Approach

Mozart and Da Ponte built ambivalence into the work's very genre label: dramma giocoso—joyful drama, or dramatic joy. The category is a contradiction. Giovanni is the funniest character in the opera and its most irredeemable one. We do not ask the audience to choose but to hold both simultaneously.

The production design drew on the Spanish colonial architecture of New Mexico, mapping Da Ponte's Seville onto the layered history of the American Southwest.

Creative Team

• Conductor: Harry Bicket
• Set Design: Michael Yeargan
• Costume Design: Catherine Zuber
• Lighting Design: Marcus Doshi
• Don Giovanni: Luca Pisaroni
• Donna Anna: Elza van den Heever
• Leporello: Kyle Ketelsen