The shift in focus creates a fascinating if occasionally opaque theatrical event that often plays more like Beckett or Pirandello than its classical antecedents. The dual Dons and their two sidekicks - Sganarelle for Juan, Leporello for Giovanni - may be acting or singing their way through scenes adapted from Moliere's play and Mozart's opera, but the landscape they inhabit is the blank, vast, godless terrain of modern existential man.
The creators of "Don Juan Giovanni," Jeune Lune artistic director Dominique Serrand and longtime associate Steven Epp, underscore the bleakness of the emotional terrain by recasting their story as a quintessentially American road trip. Don Juan and Sganarelle tool around the stage in a vintage Plymouth (its bulky elegance slightly undercut by the visible multiwheeled mechanism that carries it), passing before video projections of a Vegas-like landscape, all desert skies and neon lights.
They meet Don Giovanni and Leporello at, where else, a drive-in, which is showing a hugely operatic movie: "Don Giovanni," of course, with its disturbing opening scene of Donna Anna fleeing from the rapacious leading man. Movie and reality collide, Giovanni and Leporello jump in the back of the Plymouth, and the narrative takes off on a careening, cavorting, and occasionally confusing joy ride through the mixed-up plots of opera and play.
Along the way, arias end up in unexpected mouths, but often to powerful effect. The heartbreaking devotion of an abandoned lover in "Dalla sua pace," for example, becomes freshly touching here, when it's given to the geeky, gawky car mechanic Peter, whose fiancee Charlotte has attracted Don Juan's ever-questing eye. You won't recognize those characters from Mozart, but the emotions they express are as Mozartean - and universally familiar - as they come.
