Director Robert Falls’ signature maximalism is still with us, I am happy to report, even though Chicago’s most important theatrical auteur exited the Goodman Theatre in 2022. That’s by virtue of opera companies (unlike nonprofit theaters) keeping around successful productions, such as the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 2014 staging of “Don Giovanni” from an era that I, as a longtime witness, would describe as peak Falls.
So there we all were again Saturday night as the Lyric opened its 2026-27 season, enjoying the massive sets from the frequent Falls collaborator Walt Spangler, a veritable feast of groaning, Ghost of Christmas Past tables, verdant hedgerows, huge Moorish light fixtures and massive stone exteriors that call to mind Falls’ signature Eugene O’Neill stagings with their referents to classical tragedy and humans overwhelmed by their own circumstances.
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This “Don Giovanni” also has a foot in another Falls specialty, Tennessee Williams, with Ana Kuzmanic’s eclectic costumes embracing the complex push-pull of seduction and power (which bedevils us still) and Duane Schuler’s lights shining accusatorily throughout the opera house at the show’s climax, demanding of the audience their position on the lustful title character’s final exit into hell (imagined here as a “Sweeney Todd”-like chute, perhaps into the Chicago River) and inviting us to ponder whether we, being sinners all, might be heading for the same fate.
Of course, Christian Van Horn, the longtime Lyric favorite who fills out every inch and note of one of opera’s most cheerfully despicable roles, then gets to pick himself up out of the pit, shake himself off and head perhaps to the bar for a well-deserved drink. Presumably, Don Giovanni will not be so lucky.
Twelve years on from my first viewing, it feels like this production is part of a greatest hits album of Falls’ decades-long aesthetic obsessions, given which might now seem to some obscene levels of resources, and part of an expressionistic world tour of the titular lothario’s seductions, given that we are told early on by his disgruntled sideman Leporello (the self-effacing Tommaso Barea) that their locations have been as varied as the age, stature and style of the seductees.
This all goes on for some three-and-a-half hours. It is all, one might say, a lot.
Falls often was a lot. But a match for the title.
I’d go so far as to say that this production, which does not problematize the libretto’s palpable enjoyment of aspects of Don Giovanni, nor act as its apologist, probably would not have been conceived from scratch quite like this today, for a whole variety of reasons. Some purely pragmatic. Some perhaps for the best.
Opera was a sideline for Falls but he always embraced its excesses with the kind of delight I could read on his face Saturday night as he took his bow. He also delighted in its conventions, knowing when to bring in a lush and apt drop, get everything else out of the way, push the singer everyone had come to hear forward toward the orchestra pit and what is now Enrique Mazzola’s baton, and coax them into communicating with equal elements of theatricality and intimacy. It works spectacularly well here with the soprano Mané Galoyan’s vocally transfixing Donna Anna, the instigator of the revenge plot in what would be a revenge tragedy were not Don G too unsympathetic to be a tragic hero. And everyone from soprano Nina Solodovnikova’s uber-chic Donna Elvira, who looks like Scarlett Johansson if she were in a Fellini movie, to tenor Lawrence Brownlee’s Don Ottavio to Anna El-Khashem’s Zerlina, gets and deserves their rich moment of focus. El-Khashem, playing a peasant girl seduced at the very moment of her matrimony, has a daunting dramatic task not unlike anyone essaying Lady Anne in William Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” Remarkably, El-Khashem pulls off her half of “Là ci darem la mano” with a disarmingly quotidian ease.
Perhaps I have seen “Amadeus” too many times, but it seems to me that the enduring appeal of this particular title comes in part from the remove of the composer from its dramatic content; one can close one’s eyes for a second or two, listen to Mozart’s music, and imagine the ideas and formalist experiments swirling chaotically in his head, cued by Lorenzo de Ponte’s libretto, for sure, but also cued from Mozart’s own distinct kaleidoscope. Notes seem to cascade from every collective pore of the orchestra, and yet even though the woodwinds sometimes chart the rhythms of seduction in ways you would expect, there invariably is a quizzical element to Mozart’s music, which perhaps explains the way Mazzola, whose body often reflects what is inside his head, just cocks his head from time to time as one section or another of his orchestra goes off god knows where, maybe on the devil’s behalf. As if Mozart were going rogue. Don Giovanni would understand.
At its core, the opera, first seen at Lyric back in the foundational 1954, is structurally simple: “That man murdered my husband,” Donna Anna declares, sparking the “How did it happen?” question, and explanation, of the night. Galoyan clearly understands that Donna Anna’s power to usurp the title character is crucial and that she must sing as a force to be reckoned with, not that he can. That way, “Don Giovanni” can be seen as an exploration not so much of a libertine of legend dating back to the 17th century but of the consequences of his actions and the crucial levels of resistance.
Van Horn’s remarkable singing makes you feel why Don Giovanni has been so successful at his chosen life’s work and also why it is so pathetic and so subject to diminishing returns. With cascading damage.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
Review: “Don Giovanni” (3.5 stars)
When: Through Nov. 1
Where: Lyric Opera of Chicago, 20 N. Wacker Drive
Running time: 3 hours, 25 minutes
Tickets: $48-$402 at 312-827-5600 and lyricopera.org
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