Florentine Really Really Updates Mozart

Cosi Fan Tutte: Remix. Photo courtesy of the Florentine Opera Company.

The oddity of the year is how a famous opera from the 18^th century by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte qualifies to be part of the current Wisconsin theater festival of world premieres!

But this one is a world premiere by complicated route from the East Coast caused by COVID-19 and rescued by the enterprise of the Florentine Opera.

It has been amusingly updated (or flat-reinvented) with American idioms by Kelley Rourke, features musicians under keyboardist Laurann Gilley who can do Mozart like a small chamber group and also as a feisty Mozartean jazz band – all handed over to Wisconsin’s most inventive director of operas, Jill Anna Ponasik, who also runs the Milwaukee Opera Theatre.

In a brisk 90 minutes, Cosi Fan Tutte: Remix is not just a slight update in name. It pretends to be set in a popular student union in the 1980s and then 20 years later for a reunion of the couples who paired off then and now.

While she can sing well when required, soprano Nicole Heinen spends most of her stage time being a comic emcee for the event, even inviting the audience to sing the fight song at the (inside joke) La Ponte College. (Librettist Da Ponte, incidentally, was a notorious womanizer and late-in-life professor, which sure fits the college setting.) Heinen’s blowsy blonde behavior also lends satirical counterpoint for baritone David Guzman.

Another irony — hearing intro music by the likes of Lionel Richie (“All Night Long”), Bonnie Tyler (“Total Eclipse of the Heart”) and Tina Turner (“What’s Love Got to Do With It”) – a contemporary selection from the 1980s that duplicates the themes of the original opera and Rourke’s new libretto. In this version, rather than testing female fidelity with Albanian soldiers, both sexes are tempted and embarrassed amid alcohol excess, college games and extended chords of romance and remorse.

There is some clumsiness to this time warp, so bring your sense of humor. A good argument could be made whether this extends Mozart’s importance or brings it down to collegiate earth. While love-sick recitatives by Mozart-La Ponte sound great in Italian, here they are made deliberately to sound like pop lyrics. “I am woman, hear me roar” is sung well with trills by Laura McCauley (along with Tzytle Steinman as one of the two sopranos Mozart gives equal space to), but it sure will shock Mozart purists in the house. Which may be the point.

The drunken finger-pointing is stretched in time to cover the arias and famous group numbers. The cast contains willing and sometimes quite capable actors, but it is sometimes pushing the antics to make Cosi cozy with the modern concept. The musical flourishes of the original can easily tread into vaudeville territory in a college setting.

The singers are clearly having the time of their lives. They get to perform – and quite well – some of Mozart’s great arpeggios, yet in everyday dress with street gestures and for a director asking for acting chops and stage movement over isolated musical ability. Yet this acting benefits the singing, as tenor Patrick Bessenbacher and baritone Zachary Crowle discover, as do the sopranos who have to soar atop the sound waves while darting in full volume across sprawling bodies.

Ponasik stages it smartly with the cast constantly moving, with the orchestra visible behind a couch, a poker table and a billiard set (we said it was a student union!), even making a musical quartet look like a sextet to keep the plot lively. There are moments of the men discussing conduct that Mozart would never have gotten away with.

The finale is a nifty piece of staging involving projected slides of passing college youth. The costumes by Leslie Vaglica (and the wigs by Erica Cartledge) add to the professionalism.

This production also represents one of those rare two weekend occasions for the Florentine Opera Company, which means the reviewer gets a chance to push a second week crowd, for shows at 7:30 p.m. Friday March 24 and 2 p.m. Sunday March 26 at the Wilson Theater, a smaller venue inside Vogel Hall at the back of the Marcus Performing Arts Center, where the Florentine usually takes over the large Uihlein Hall for one weekend.

Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blogs here and here.