Miami Summer Music Festival closes on a high note with cleverly staged, gloriously sung Don Giovanni

"Director Jeffrey Buchman’s Giovanni is thoughtful, carefully crafted, and always entertaining.  Too often, opera productions built around a directorial concept fail because the director forges on without any regard for the libretto. This modern-dress production is effective because it’s not at odds with what’s written. Buchman–who has directed several acclaimed FGO productions, including Andy Vores’ No Exit–actually enhances Lorenzo Da Ponte’s often ludicrous libretto.

...perfectly choreographed by Rosa Mercedes, note-for-note.

The action is played in front of projected photos of Monte Carlo’s casino, shoreline and cruise port. Buchman stages the overture, a modern directorial conceit that has become cliché, but he doesn’t do it simply to make his presence known.  As the orchestra plays, we see Giovanni blindfolding and raping Donna Anna, something that’s not called for in the original libretto. Why do we have to see this? We’ll know soon enough that Giovanni does bad things.  But Buchman knows that we live in an age in which video of an event has greater impact than the spoken telling of one, and his decision pays off nearly three hours later when the Commendatore dispatches Giovanni to hell. Until this point, Giovanni has been such an engaging, fun-loving character that we might not want to see him go if the violent rape scene wasn’t still fresh in our minds."

South Florida Classical Review