Christian Van Horn’s Don Giovanni clings to a dining table as it sinks slowly into hell. After an evening of sexual pursuit, violence and evasion, the Don has run out of ways to escape the consequences of his actions. Only a supernatural act can stop a man no one else has been able to hold accountable. The scene feels grimly contemporary in a world where powerful men can evade consequences even after their abuses become widely known.

This is the Don Giovanni Robert Falls built for Lyric Opera, whose 2026-2027 season opened October 10 with a revival of the production first staged in 2014 and revived in 2019. Falls relocates Mozart’s opera to 1920s Spain, a setting that gives the opera a recognizable urban character without distancing it too much from the present day. Walt Spangler’s sets sketch a landscape of gray buildings, balconies and commercial signs, drawing the eye upward toward a nodding statue and along the terraced garden through which the cast threads its way. The design keeps the singers, and the tensions between them, squarely in view.

Within that visual design, Falls directs with an occasionally blunt hand. A 35-year veteran as artistic director of the Goodman Theatre, he favors clarity over suggestion: Giovanni slides his hand up Zerlina’s dress; handcuffs restrain a conquest; a late tantrum sends plates flying and ends with a gunshot wound. Like the descent into hell, these gestures leave little room for inference, making the violence unmistakable but sometimes narrowing the opera’s interpretive possibilities.

That same question of how much ambiguity the piece can bear runs deeper than staging. Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte classified Don Giovanni as a “dramma giocoso,” a form that mingles comedy and drama. The label can seem at odds with the plot. The opera opens with an attempted rape, followed almost immediately by a murder. Giovanni spends much of the evening evading accountability while pursuing new conquests. Donna Elvira threatens to expose him. He approaches Zerlina during her wedding celebrations. Donna Anna and her fiancé, Don Ottavio, seek her father’s killer. Little of this sounds comic, yet Da Ponte’s text abounds in quick reversals and verbal sparring. The comedy makes the proximity of pleasure and cruelty more disturbing.

In this production, neither Giovanni nor Leporello leans heavily into that comedy. Their exchanges rarely draw the easy laughter that would pull an audience into their company. Van Horn sang Giovanni with a seductive, knowing quality that projected easy confidence. This Don understood the ruin he left in his wake yet remained utterly unfazed. Van Horn balanced that magnetism with a calculating edge that enticed and repelled at the same time. Enabling him, Tommaso Barea delivered a weary, frustrated Leporello whose loyalty is weighed down by exhaustion. Even the comic moments felt grave. His catalogue aria, “Madamina, il catalogo è questo,” came across less as mischievous bragging than as a cruel accounting of Giovanni’s sexual conquests.

By diminishing Giovanni’s charm, Van Horn and Barea allowed the three female leads to emerge as distinct, realized characters rather than variations on the Don’s conquests. Mané Galoyan’s Donna Anna radiated an unwavering determination to secure justice. Nina Solodovnikova’s Donna Elvira was more visibly and vocally divided: in “Mi tradì quell’alma ingrata,” her anger remained inseparable from her attachment to Giovanni. Anna El-Khashem brought a mix of innocence and desire to Zerlina, who, on the day of her marriage to Christopher Humbert Jr.’s volatile Masetto, found herself drawn to Giovanni’s seductions.

Lawrence Brownlee’s Don Ottavio offered another counterweight to the Don. The lyrical tenderness of his two principal arias, combined with an understated stage presence, provided a welcome contrast to Van Horn’s forceful portrayal. As the Commendatore, David Leigh gave the final confrontation commanding weight, his call for repentance cutting through the turmoil.

Mozart’s score supplied the evening’s fullest range of expression. Enrique Mazzola led the orchestra in a serious, firmly grounded reading that was responsive to the singers and reinforced the production’s severity. Yet the orchestra also conveyed the music’s shifting moods, moving between lyrical tenderness and disquieting dissonance without losing the sense of the larger drama. Mozart seems to find a melody for every situation, but the music can turn from lightness to menace in an instant. In the closing confrontation, the trombones lent the Commendatore’s supernatural authority a chilling weight. The orchestra brought out a dramatic complexity that the staging, for all its clarity, sometimes left unexplored.

Falls’s Don Giovanni does not resolve the opera’s contradictions. Its darkness sometimes flattens the comedy, while its bluntness leaves little for the audience to discover. But the production refuses to let Giovanni’s charm excuse his cruelty. It keeps his victims in view, even as Mozart reminds us why the Don’s company can be so dangerously pleasurable.

Originally published on Third Coast Review

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Around Chicago

Lawrence A. Johnson, Chicago Classical Review

“Singing his signature role in Chicago for the first time, Van Horn more than lived up to expectations. At 47, the towering singer still has booming vocal power as well as a rich, burnished tone and remarkable flexibility. He encompassed all sides of the superficially charming yet morally vacuous libertine, vocally and dramatically. For having such a big voice, he was able to throw off “Fin ch’han del vino” at impressive velocity, while drawing in the Don’s next victim with a mellifluous, enticing serenade (“Deh, vieni alla finestra”).”

Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

“At its core, the opera, first seen at Lyric back in the foundational 1954, is structurally simple: “That man murdered my husband,” Donna Anna declares, sparking the “How did it happen?” question, and explanation, of the night. Galoyan clearly understands that Donna Anna’s power to usurp the title character is crucial and that she must sing as a force to be reckoned with, not that he can. That way, “Don Giovanni” can be seen as an exploration not so much of a libertine of legend dating back to the 17th century but of the consequences of his actions and the crucial levels of resistance.”

M.L. Rantala, Hyde Park Herald

“Tommaso Barea is a splendid Leporello, Giovanni’s somewhat unwilling servant. His Catalog Aria is both humorous and graceful. The Russian-Lebanese soprano Anna El-Khashem makes an attractive Zerlina, giving the role a pleasing innocence. Her betrothed, Masetto, is sung with fire by Christopher Humbert Jr. David Leigh’s Commendatore lacks a certain vocal power yet has a presence that gives him gravitas. This is particularly true when he is magnificently covered in a patina-like finish from head to toe, looking truly like a statue.”

Suzanne Magnuson, Splash Magazines

“Van Horn is the production’s formidable anchor. His Giovanni possesses the imposing vocal presence and physical authority the role demands, but what distinguishes the performance is the character’s moral emptiness. This is not a romantic outlaw whose wickedness can be excused by a winning smile or a taste for adventure. Van Horn gives us a man who has mistaken entitlement for personal freedom and other people’s vulnerability for an invitation to exploit them.”

Kyle MacMillan, Chicago Sun Times

“Soprano Nina Solodovnikova, also making a standout Lyric debut, handles Donna Elvira’s high-flying coloratura passagework with striking aplomb and conveys both the character’s fearless moxie and introspective doubts. With its nuanced, tonal shadings, her hushed, pained Act 2 aria in which she admits feeling pity for Giovanni despite everything is one of the production’s highlights.

None of the three shows more dramatic range than soprano Mané Galoyan as Donna Anna, who tinges her lower register with shady hues as she mourns the death of her father at the hands of Giovanni but injects a steely tone as she vows vengeance.”

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