NZ Opera's seductive Don Giovanni

Photo / Neil McKenzie

Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni centres on a scoundrel who is having a great time ‘scaring the world’.

Auckland opera audiences have become accustomed to having Verdi and Puccini presented through the eyes of female directors from across the Tasman. In 2012, Lindy Hume gave us Rigoletto while Kate Cherry was responsible for Madame Butterfly last year and La Traviata just a few months ago.

New Zealand Opera's Don Giovanni is the work of New Zealander Sara Brodie, a familiar name around the country for a variety of theatrical and musical ventures. Christchurch-born Brodie came to opera relatively late, although she does remember "seeing The Magic Flute once upon a time in Christchurch". She was 18, working in musical theatre in London, when she decided to learn an operatic aria. "I toyed with the idea of auditioning for one of the big schools" but, in the end, dismissed it as "far too scary for a career move".

Brodie does feel, however, that her extensive dance background ("13 years of ballet training and some American jazz dance a long time ago") has very much influenced her approach to opera.

"It's been a great help in terms of theatrical staging," she explains. "Especially with choruses, moving groups of people around. I tend to work very kinetically and try to draw the same out of the singers."

Opera is "a big beast", she laughs, "with so many elements to be balanced". Yet she warns me about being too quick to applaud what seem like artistic touches.

"A lot of what I do comes down to practicality. I giggle away when somebody talks about artistic decisions when, more often than not, they come about through issues of dollars and cents or availability."

Earlier this year she was responsible for the staging of Golijov's opera, Ainadamar, presented by the NZ Symphony Orchestra at the NZ Arts Festival. She had just five hours of rehearsal, but in opera, you are forced to maximise what time you have.

"We have to work quickly, with singers who need to know their roles when they walk in the door."

The upcoming Don Giovanni has not lacked full rehearsals, being a revival of a production first seen in Christchurch last year.

"Revisiting the opera was not just a matter of finding out what worked well the first time and pushing the repeat button. There were things we wanted to make clearer, characters to be probed more deeply."

Her Giovanni, English baritone Mark Stone, just off the plane from the other side of the globe, has been told there should be more fun and abandon in his character. "Mark was rather cool in Christchurch but he should be the most joyous person on the stage, having a great time and scaring the world."

Brodie is reworking the relationship between Giovanni and his manservant Leporello. In Christchurch, Jonathan Lemalu played the part; this time, we have Australian Warwick Fyfe, last seen here in the title role in Rigoletto.

"It will be a very quirky character," she reveals. "With some very strange obsessions. Leporello likes to watch and is satisfied with being a man on the periphery, but I also think there's a touch of Everyman in this character. It's a nightmarish world for these people," Brodie muses, talking of her concept for the opera, played in modern dress in a politically flustered Spain of just a few years ago. Characters are defined by how they react to Don Giovanni.

"Their feelings often move between love and hate, particularly with Leporello, Donna Anna and Donna Elvira."

Performance
What: Don Giovanni
Where and when: Aotea Centre, opens September 18 at 7.30pm, then September 20, 24, 26 at 7.30pm; September 28 at 2.30pm

Discussing the wronged women in the Don's life, Brodie tells how Wyn Davies, NZO's music director, suggested the piece could be titled Donna Anna's Revenge. "Yet, although Donna Anna, played by Lisa Harper-Brown, is determined to be avenged, she's not an entirely honorable character herself."

The truth comes out in the rush of recitatives which "toy with the audience's imagination as to what happened in that bedroom. How much happened? Did she enjoy it? Did she instigate it or is she making it up?"

Anna Leese's Donna Elvira is much more honorable. "She is genuinely in love with Don Giovanni and completely torn between the way he treated her and her love for him."

Brodie settles on the young peasant Zerlina for her favourite, played by Amelia Berry, with Robert Tucker as her faithful partner, Masetto.

"They have quite a tempestuous relationship. But they're very human. They are the couple we see getting together and, when all is done, we suspect they'll be staying together."