That time when you're stoked about performing your favorite Mozart opera-
And then the cocking stage director sends you his 'great concept' through email. And all excitement gets sucked out of the room as if a fucking Dementor had sashayed in.
Apparently the director felt that the 'Ending of the opera (the final sextet) didn't fit in with the dramatic concept of the show', so he cut it. Apparently he’s changing the opera so that at the scene where Don Giovanni is visited by the man he murdered, the scene is reset to the act I scene where he (offstage in Act I) tried to rape Donna Anna. And the great stage director will reveal that in the duel with Donna Anna’s father, it was actually Don Giovanni who got killed OoOoOoOooOOoo Shyamalan twist, THE WHOLE OPERA PLAYED OUT IN GIOVANNI’S MIND AS HE WAS DYING! He actually makes a mention of The Sixth Sense in the email- because we make things edgy by referencing a 17-year-old movie. Ooh! ooh! I have another way to make it edgy! Have Donna Elvira discover that THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!
But the thing that takes the cake is this little paragraph of presumptuousness where he hopes to :
“explore the push and pull of the Freudian concept of Id, Ego, and Super Ego” and how the characters are all manifestations of the ID-impulse-lust, Superego-conscience and Ego-balance. With the ending showing that, when the Commendatore takes Don Giovanni’s hand, the Don will open his shirt to reveal it soaked in his own blood and he will begin to realize he was the one killed and his life will finally unravel.
The conceit of it. "The ending the composer (Mozart, no less) composed didn't fit in with my blatant self-aggrandizement to show off what a smart cookie I am, so I've taken it out and replaced it with outmoded Freudian psychoanalysis to add smugly to the heap, being completely oblivious that this specific kind of reinvention was cliché 50 years ago when I was a fetus in the womb."
This has gone from 'a job I was looking forward to' to 'a job to get through just to have the role in my resume in the hopes of a better production in the future.' Unfortunately it is the Age of the Stage Director. The music director has no weight in most companies to pull back the nutbuttery. Fuck these ‘High Concept’ stage directors- if they want to parade what pretentious pricks they are, they can write their own plays and operas that nobody will see instead of piggybacking on someone else’s masterpiece that will guarantee them a captive audience.
What sucks is that 90% of the companies out there do not disclose the details of a production unless they're renting a pre-made production. Many times, the 'Great Director' hasn't fully completed 'his/her vision' until after contracts have been signed, so most singers are signing up blind when the audition and they have to hope they get a stage director who is not awful.
