The subtitle of Mozart and Da Ponte’s third and last opera, Cosi fan tutte (loosely translated as Everybody Does It, although the Italian title refers specifically to women) is La Scuola degli Amanti – the school for lovers. In his new Juilliard production of the opera, director David Paul (whose 2016 Juilliard production of a concert version of Bellini’s La Sonnambula I fondly remember) not only chose a contemporary setting but literally a High school: the action unfolds on the day after final graduation, finding the two befriended teenage couples, Ferrando and Dorabella, and Guglielmo and Fiordiligi, still hanging out in the school’s public bathroom and their “secret hideout,” located beneath the bleachers of the school’s sports stadium. In this scenario, Don Alfonso, who coaxes the two young men into a daring challenge to test their girlfriend’s faithfulness, is the school’s burly, blue-collar caretaker (played with brooding flair by bass-baritone William Socolof), whereas the girls’ confidante Despina is a literature teacher in a smart suit and nerdy glasses (played with the edge of a neurotic, closeted dominatrix by soprano Mer Wohlgemut).
The fact that the four lovers were played by performers who are about the same age as the characters they were portraying was a welcome advantage: the slight physical awkwardness of youth is hard to portray past a certain age, and it was very touching to see it laid out so bluntly in front of our eyes. We all know the uncoordinated body movements and bad styling choices of young age – there they were: bad hairdos, grungy, unbecoming outfits, along with the uneasy vacillating between exaggerated swagger, nail-biting angst, and inflated virtue-posturing. The staging was quirky if a bit on the manic side but that, too, worked in the context of hyperemotional teenage drama, accessorized with cellphones, the constant taking of selfies, and the frequent lapsing into the kind of sleepwalking syndrome that takes over one’s body when reality is moving faster than you can process it. I especially loved the moment when Dorabella and Fiordiligi, dolled up in velvet dresses, struggled to walk up the steep bleachers in their high heel shoes and sat down like young girls who crashed an adult party and are terrified they might have bitten off more than they could chew. Which is of course exactly what ends up happening.
I found the cast all around excellent: tenor James Ley (Fernando), whom I had seen perform twice before (at Renée Flemings’ Songstudio series at Carnegie Hall and as Don Ottavio in Juilliard’s recent production of Don Giovanni) has a dreamy voice some would kill for, and this is a perfect role for him. Soprano Kathleen O’Mara as Fiordiligi was a standout – her meltingly tender Per Pietà was a musical highlight of the night (along with the fantastic sextet at the end of Act I, which always gives me goosebumps and which the production’s energetic musical director Nimrod David Pfeffer conducted exhilaratingly fast, giving it the thrill of the last stretch of a car race.) Megan Moore was a sultry Dorabella, and Erik Van Heyningen’s Guglielmo’s was oozing insouciant sex appeal. At the end of Act I, I thought to myself: “So far, so good. It’s cute, well-acted, musically beautifully executed, and the setup is more or less plausible.” And I wondered, not for the first time, how I would stage this notoriously difficult opera. What if the girls did not fall for their boyfriends’ disguises but, instead, pretended that they did, just to get even with them?
Imagine my surprise when – spoiler alert – in Act II, Mr. Paul decided to let Dorabella unwittingly unmask Guglielmo during their duet. It was a startling, riveting moment. For a moment, the two faced each other in stunned disbelief – and ended up doing exactly what one does when one is young and stupid: the wrong thing, thereby doubling the betrayal, causing even more confusion, and adding a sense of guilt and shame to the already dicey situation. To see Fiordiligi deliver her heart-rendering ode to faithful love moments later while her boyfriend is seen having steamy sex with her best friend in the booth behind her was a bitter pill to swallow, and I will defend this strategic bit of staging against any reproach of cheapness or vulgarity: this stuff is real, and it happens every day. Dorabella’s urge to coax Fiordiligi later on into marrying the other guy in a double marriage now took on an entire new meaning: it is her desperate initiative that might lessen her own sense of guilt for having betrayed her with her lover. By the time Despina arrives disguised as a cheap Elvis impersonator to officiate a shoddy, Vegas-style wedding, all four youngsters are completely dazed and confused by the mess they have found themselves in. The big reveal of the conspiracy is no longer a big reveal but just another blow onto a double pair of mentally exhausted victims. E del mondo in mezzo ai turbini bella calma proverà? Not very likely.
Much of Baroque opera is about ennobling human suffering at the hands of the Gods or fate. Così fan tutte radically breaks with that tradition, bluntly showing its protagonists’ shortcomings while treating them with deep affection and tenderness, never slipping into cynicism. Because of its built-in elements of Commedia dell ‘Arte and buffoonery, it remains notoriously difficult to stage no matter what, and moving away from its original storyline and highly specific original instructions means opening a Pandora’s box of incongruities. On the other hand, the plot of the opera is precisely about the unreliability of the human character, murky motivations, the lack of logic in our actions and the futility of rational reasoning: sometimes, there is no logic, no closure, and no redemption. And we still must do our best to give and find love. Viewed from that angle, this Juilliard production was another resounding success.