LOS ANGELES — If ever there was a work of art that dramatized the unpredictable consequences of fooling with people’s affections, Mozart’s Così fan tutte fills the bill. The composer’s third and final (after Don Giovanni) collaboration with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, Così was considered demeaning to women even in its own time. But the opera’s crude assault on romantic illusions and expectations remains modern enough to have inspired many versions mounted in widely different settings and eras.
Welcome to Wolfbridge Country Club (telephone: Amadeus 1790), circa late 1930s. So begins the screwball 2021 San Francisco Opera production of Così fan tutte, ported over to Los Angeles Opera. This mostly comforting, often thoughtful Così opened March 8 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to lots of laughs, a little heartbreak, and some confusion.
Expertly directed by Shawna Lucey, this Così offers a refreshingly humorous feminist take on the story of two boy-men, Ferrando (tenor Anthony León) and Guglielmo (baritone Justin Austin), provoked by an older, flask-sipping bachelor, Don Alfonso. This Don, portrayed by commanding baritone Rod Gilfry as a Southern gentleman sporting a devilish goatee, persuades the boys to make a bet playing a cruel joke on their betrothed: They will pretend to be called off to war but actually disguise themselves as different men to test their fiancées’ fidelity.
Wearing ridiculous mustaches, the two guys fool the two sisters — soprano Erica Petrocelli as Fiordiligi and mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb as Dorabella — into believing they are Albanians as they attempt to entrap their betrothed into betraying them. So the farce begins; and, yes, allow a wide berth for the stretching of your credulity. This is, purportedly at least, opera buffa.
However, reconciling Così‘s first-act caricatures of the unrealistic expectations of youth with the emotional wreckage of the second has remained a tantalizing challenge. It helped that director Lucey and her excellent ensemble of actor-singers committed totally to the equal skewering of both the susceptible young women and thin-skinned young men.
Petrocelli’s Fiordiligi and Chaieb’s Dorabella channeled nightmare adolescent selves with mock-unhinged intensity. At one point, Dorabella’s despair over her absent fiancé has her running into a wall, a cartoonish moment to be sure, but genuinely funny. A three-hour-plus production needs all the help it can get.
With her stunningly rich mezzo-soprano, Chaieb’s dark timbre offered grounding contrast to Petrocelli’s mellifluous coloratura. Throughout, the ensemble singing was consistently strong, especially with the sisters and Alfonso in the touching trio, “Soave sia il vento.”
In Fiordiligi’s “Come scoglio,” Petrocelli’s diction showed a slight loss of clarity at the lower end and a bit of shrillness at the top. But she offered plenty of Mozartian vocal agility in the more than two octaves her role requires. She favored a wide vibrato in the first act, tightening it up for the more genuine emotion in the second-act duets and arias.
The men were similarly game. León gave plenty of tender warmth to Ferrando’s “Un’ aura amorosa.” Austin made sure Guglielmo’s buffo arias were properly energetic; his duet with Dorabella, “Il core vi dono,” was particularly persuasive.
But soprano Ana María Martínez, as the maid Despina, came off as the true queen of the night, a proto-feminist misandrist who cynically suggests in her Act I aria, “In uomini, in soldati,” that women should never trust men, and that they should be loyal only to themselves. Lucey and the production’s original creator, director Michael Cavanagh (who died in March 2024), wisely update Da Ponte’s problematic libretto by allowing Despina to reveal the men’s deception to Fiordiligi and Dorabella, giving the women agency and a measure of revenge.
Designer Constance Hoffman’s inventive red-white-and-blue costumes, including an outrageous golf outfit for Despina when she is disguised as an “electro-magnetic” doctor, consistently delighted. At one point, Lucey stages a bathing beauty contest parody with middle-aged men parading by, some hilariously posing in their singlets.
The country club set and production design by Erhard Rom offer the misguided lovers and fine chorus, directed by Jeremy Frank, plenty of room to move around. This production breathes. There’s also enough hugging and kissing that an intimacy director, Sara E. Widzer, was required.
Under conductor James Conlon, the LA Opera Orchestra maintained a Mozartian lightness, clarity, and lively pace. Conlon often had to choose between highlighting the composer’s subtle scoring or carefully supporting the hard-working cast. At times, his restraint came at the price of making the score disappear into the background, but his first loyalty was clearly to the singers on stage.
“I have never felt that Mozart was happy with the libretto of Così fan tutte,” wrote musicologist Joseph Kerman in Opera and the Morbidity of Music. While this production hardly represents the last attempt to solve all of Così‘s touchy problems, it’s ebulliently satisfying.
Così fan tutte runs for five more performances through March 30 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. For tickets, go here.
