Review: Don Giovanni returns to Lyric Opera of Chicago with a timely 1920s staging

Robert Falls’s 1920s Spanish staging, with a cocaine-fuelled Giovanni and a lights-up finale, turns Mozart’s closing sextet into a call to question complicity in abuse.

Title	Don Giovanni
Company	Lyric Opera of Chicago
Venue	Lyric Opera House, Chicago
Date	10 October 2026
Reviewer	Scott C Morgan

A chorus of audience groans greeted Lyric Opera of Chicago general director John Mangum when he appeared in front of the curtain for the season-opening performance of Don Giovanni. But Mangum immediately quelled worries about indisposed singers by stating that he was there instead to share several Lyric milestones.

In taking on the title lothario of Don Giovanni, American bass-baritone Christian Van Horn was both assuming his 20th role and marking his 150th performance with Lyric Opera of Chicago. Van Horn was able to rack up such impressive numbers in part by being an alumnus of the Lyric’s Ryan Opera Center, a training programme for young artists, before his international career took off. In a nice parallel, Van Horn’s first Lyric assignment was in 2004 as a Masetto cover for the company’s starry 50th anniversary production of Don Giovanni with the likes of Bryn Terfel, Susan Graham and others.

Mangum’s curtain speech also marked the tenth anniversary of Lyric music director Enrique Mazzola, who made his company conducting debut in 2016 with Lucia di Lammermoor. In 2021, Mazzola became the Lyric’s third-ever music director following the tenures of Bruno Bartoletti (1964–1999) and Sir Andrew Davis (2000–2021).

With all these milestones mentioned, the music-making began with Mazzola leading the Lyric Opera Orchestra in a dutiful rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ (an annual company tradition to open the season). Mazzola and company then quickened the pace for the opera proper.

Composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte’s famed 1787 dramma giocoso (humorous drama) simultaneously feels of its time and disturbingly of our own. That’s thanks to high-profile US headlines about university campus rape allegations and adjudicated sexual predators who unrepentantly abuse their positions of power.

The Lyric’s current production of Don Giovanni is a production created in 2014, for the company’s 60th anniversary, by director Robert Falls, the former artistic director of Chicago’s own Goodman Theatre and a Tony Award winner for the 1999 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. For the Lyric’s two Don Giovanni revivals, Falls chose to return both in 2019 and now rather than hand off re-staging duties to an assistant director.

What emerges is a proven staging that moves fleetly along without any pauses for major scenery changes. Of course it helps that set designer Walt Spangler has created very adaptable set pieces that can represent a number of exterior and interior locations.

Falls also cleverly deploys a textured curtain of big black roses that is lowered during key arias to cover additional set changes. Veteran Lyric lighting designer Duane Schuler assists to keep the nighttime scenes appropriately murky (and to help hide set elements being moved on and off).

Falls updates the action of Don Giovanni to 1920s Spain, with the characters all unaware that their country is on the cusp of a brutal civil war. Falls also emphasises Don Giovanni’s dominant debauchery by giving him a cocaine habit, and a penchant for non-consensual choking and handcuffs in his sexual conquests.

As this out-of-control nobleman, Van Horn makes for a towering presence and naturally carries a suave air of authority of someone who always gets his way (until now). Van Horn’s hulking physique also aided in exposing his character’s brutish side, especially near the end, since Falls plays up Don Giovanni’s dining-room depravity by having a kidnapped female servant bound behind the radio that plays pop tunes during his meal.

Vocally, Van Horn was very assured, save for a few moments when switching gears into his head voice. Otherwise, Van Horn offered what you would want from this complicated character (American bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen takes over the title role for the final two performances (on 31 October and 1 November).

Trailing Van Horn’s demanding Don Giovanni is Venetian bass-baritone Tommaso Barea as a tall and lanky Leporello, blithely sharing an understated sarcasm and self-loathing for his loyalty to such an abusive master. Barea masterfully handled Leporello’s famed ‘catalogue aria’, and was very capable with the many comic bits required of him.

After triumphing as Gilda in the Lyric’s 2024 revival of Rigoletto, Armenian soprano Mané Galoyan returns to take on the aggrieved Donna Anna, who is out to avenge the murder of her father, a military leader, the Commendatore (American bass David Leigh in an appropriately stentorian performance). True, Galoyan’s Act II coloratura could have been executed a little more cleanly, but she brought the dignity and vengeful determination necessary for Donna Anna.

American tenor Lawrence Brownlee was luxury casting as Don Ottavio, Donna Anna’s loyal fiancé, who literally takes a blood oath to appease his future bride (Falls stages them both with the Commendatore’s blood on their hands as they make this motivational pledge together). Brownlee’s breath control was a wonder, and he rightly received enormous applause for Don Ottavio’s two big arias.

Russian-Italian soprano Nina Solodovnikova was lots of fun as the embittered and abandoned Donna Elvira, solid both in her vocals and acting as an upper-class fashion-plate woman of the 1920s (even arriving on the scene with her servant on a broken-down motorcycle and sidecar). Falls comically shows cracks in Donna Elvira’s determination to take revenge right from the start, as she melts with romantic longing when Don Giovanni nuzzles her ear.

As the soon-to-be-newlywed couple of Zerlina and Masetto, Russian-Lebanese soprano Anna El-Khashem and American bass-baritone Christopher Humbert Jr (a recent Ryan Opera Center alumnus) made for a very enjoyable, earthy young couple who constantly spar and then make up. El-Khashem and Humbert also conveyed all the emotional conflicts of country ‘bumpkins’ who become entangled with Don Giovanni’s final predatory spree.

Along with Spangler’s lovely scenery, costume designer Ana Kuzmanić ramped up the period luxury for the opera’s noble characters – especially the glittery masked strangers of Donna Anna, Don Ottavio and Donna Elvira as they infiltrate Don Giovanni’s late-night party (they’re all up to date as Picasso fans). But Kuzmanić also emphasises the class differences by giving Zerlina and Masetto’s wedding guests much more down-to-earth costumes.

After Don Giovanni meets his demise (in a spectacular stage effect in which he and his long dining-room table tilt Titanic-like before descending below the stage in a steamy cloud of smoke), the survivors assemble for their moralising concluding sextet.

Colin Ure’s surtitle translation ‘All sinners receive their just rewards’ is projected while Falls has the lights brought up in the auditorium as the singers point out at the audience. Rather than interpreting that staging decision as the tried-and-true notion that we are sinners ourselves, this time a different thought came to mind. As an audience, we have just witnessed a sexual predator finally receive his comeuppance thanks to supernatural forces. Since that is unlikely to happen in our own day and age, I took Falls’s lights-up ending as a reflective call to action for audiences to question their own overt or neglectful complicity in aiding and abetting all those who abuse their positions of power.

All in all, this marks a very successful and satisfying revival of Don Giovanni for Lyric Opera of Chicago. It allows audiences to both revel in the work’s seductive beauty while also recoiling from all the ugly elements it reflects from our own troubled times.

The Lyric Opera of Chicago’s revival of Don Giovanni continues until 1 November at the Lyric Opera House, 20 N. Wacker Drive, Chicago. Tickets are $48–$402. For more information, visit LyricOpera.org.