A 'Cosi fan tutte' update, well-served
by Ed Siegal
The Boston Globe
August 7, 2000

Audiences are justifiably skeptical about classic opera in modern dress.  In "From Dawn to Decadence", historian Jacques Barzun singles out a performance of "Don Giovanni" with the seducer in a wheelchair, as if to say that all his sexual conquests were a fantasy.  Making Mozart a good, politically correct citizen of the 20th century is not only artistically vapid, but strips him of historical and thematic coherence.

Happily, Opera Aperta's "Cosi fan tutte" is a modern-dress, English speaking horse of another color, a thoroughly delightful romp into Mozartiana enlivened by spot-on contemporary couplets as well as ensemble playing, singing, and acting that fires on every artistic cylinder.

At the same time, Opera Aperta's production of "Cosi" is not "Opera for Idiots," although there were some idiotic hisses whenever the title-"Women are all alike," i.e., unfaithful-was stated or expanded upon.  The spirit of the opera, one which makes it particularly suitable to updating, spoofs ultra-romanticism before romanticism even became a definable movement.  The men who inisist their women are incorruptible, unshakably faithful, are as silly as the women who think nothing can shake their "Fidelio"-like stance.  the issue isn't sexism, but moral absolutism.  We already know, as stated by Despina, that all men are cads.

From the overture, in which the foursome switch sides in mixed doubles-the entire opera is set in a tennis club-it's obvious that everyone onstage is having a ball with Drew Minter's adaptation of Ruth and Thomas Martin's translation of Lorenzo Da Ponte's libretto.  The mooniness of Sarah Pelletier's Fiordiligi and Pamela Dellal's Dorabella and the cockiness of Rhyan Turner's Ferrando and David Guiliano's Guglielmo set them up for a fall engineered to perfection by David Kravitz's Don Alfonso and Leslie Bennett's Despina, here the tennis-club attendant.

As a singer, Minter has performed with Peter Sellars, who set his "Cosi" in a contemporary diner.  Minter, who directed as well as adapted the libretto, learned his updating lessons well; "Cosi" always feels as if we're straddling two worlds, Mozart's and our own.  But most impressively, despite the fact that the two suitors disguise themselves as "wild and crazy guys" from Albania and Despina dresses like a disco tart, Minter never trivializes Mozart.  If he thought the excesses of romantic love were worth satirizing, he nevertheless thought romantic love was an ideal worth pursuing, and this production is never more impressive than in its musical pursuit of that ideal.  Particularly fine are the playing of the Orchestra of Emmanuel Music under Craig Smith, Pelletier's arias, and the stunning first-act trio of Pelletier, Dellal, and Kravitz, as Alfonso and the sisters pray that Guglielmo and Ferrando have a safe voyage.

Minter and Smith set a fast pace (if anything clockin in at 3 1/2 hours could be called fast) and no one maintains that pace better than Leslie Bennett, whose Despina is an eye-popping blend of Carla like cynicism from "Cheers" and Dharma-like ditzy beauty from "Dharma and Greg," complete with a wonderful New Yawk accent.   (Don't blame me-Minter invokes situation comedies in his notes."  With index finger in throat to show what she thinks of the sisters' dreaminess, or dancing a neo-bump, Bennett has all the right moves.  (Her movement classes at Boston University must be something to see.)

The charm of this production, though, lies in its ensemble.  This "tutte" is a total hooty.

'Cosi fan tutte' and tennis, anyone?
by Ellen Pfeifer
Boston Sunday Globe
July 30, 2000

Listening to the overture to Mozart's opera "Cosi fan tutte," Drew Minter kept imagining a tennis game.  Hearing the musical dialogue of statement and response, he envisioned a rally of shots back and forth across a net.  Tennis, then, became a central image when the singer/director began stagin the work for Opera Aperta in a production that opens Friday at the Tsai Performance Center at Boston University.

Conducted by Emmanuel Music's Craig Smith, the opera features Sarah Pelletier as Fiordiligi; Pamela Dellal as Dorabella; Leslie Bennett as Despina; Ryan Turner and David Giuliano as Ferrando and Guglielmo; and David Kravitz as Don Alfonso.

In his updated vision of the piece, Minter places the action "somewhere around New London, Connecticut."  He casts the two male protagonists as graduates of a military academy, and their femal conterparts as wealthy coeds on summer vacation from their "Seven Sisters" colleges. Despina, the lady's maid in Mozart's original, becomes the snack-bar attendant at the tennis club.  Later in the opera she masquerades as a quack doctor, her all-purpose remedy is the modern-day equivalent of the Mesmerism-crystal healing in the original.

Although his "first choice" in directing an opera is always to perform it "in period", Minter decided that for this occasion a modern-day version made better sense.  For one thing, it was cheaper - an important consideration for a summer opera company.  "Period productions are expensive.  Plus you need a period theater," he said.  "The Tsai Center is a very modern-looking space and I wanted the production to harmonize with that."

Minter, a countertenor who teaches at Smith and Vassar colleges as well as the Amherst and San Francisco Early Music Workshops, knows whereof he speaks.  A scholor of 18th-centruy stage practice and a performer well-known to Boston audiences, he has appeared in both historically informed and updated productions.  Indeed, he gave a memorable portrayal of Cleopatra's punk kid brother, Tolomeo, in Peter Sellar's famous production of Handel's "Julius Caesar."

Although immersed in early-music performance practice, he realizes that, "when you do a period production, you are confronted with myths and imagery that were common knowledge to audiences at the time but may not be familiar to today's listeners.  You have to draw on paradigms that people can relate to," Minter said.

Therfore, he has, "drawn on sitcom things" and he observes that dramatic situations in "Cosi" are not unlike episodes of a television show like "Friends."  The "comedic scenes give way to moments of very deep feeling," he explained.

As part of the updating process, Minter found himself adapting the English libretto crafted by translators Ruth and Thomas Martin.  "I think their version dates from the 1940's and you simply can't use some of the language - words like 'gay' have come to have very different connotations in contemporary usage.  I did, however, develop an incredible respect for what the Martins did.  It's hard to make the accents of words match the music, even if they did get a little overzealous in creating rhymed couplets."

Of course, Minter is not the first director to stage "Cosi" in modern dress.   In New England, in particular, Peter Sellars staging, which took place in Despina's diner during the Vietnam War era, casts a very long shadow.  Minter, who saw an early version of that production, remembers little about it - which is a "lucky" thing, he thinks.

"Yes," he laughs, "the first designer we worked with kept trying to steer me toward a diner setting.  I said, 'No, we're not going to go that route."

Minter also acknowledges that a tennis setting has been done on previous occasions.   "I once did an apprentice program and we performed the guy trios in tennis clothes.  And the Chicago Lyric Opera has done it in tennis togs too."

Still, he maintains that the opera lends itself to a contemporary incarnation - particularly when it comes to dealing with the final resolution of the plot.

"People started really changing the plot early in the history of the opera," he said.  Some had, "the original couples getting together at the end.   Some had the lovers paired with their new lovers."  The director doesn't have a problem with either solution.  "They're all fine, but often dissatisfying in performance because there is not enough of a setup.  I've tried to create a little more ambiguity in the relationships."

Without divulging how he will resolve the problem of mixed-up couples, he states that, "today we have a different idea of the fluidity of relationships.  Unlike the 18th century, we don't make financial liaisons.  We marry for love and divorce a lot for love.  Among my college students, I see girls who switch boyfriends and there is no bitterness between them at all.  So in 'Cosi' Dorabella mentions Fiordiligi's boyfriend first.  Maybe she likes her sister's boyfriend a little more than you might expect."

If 'Cosi' had been written as a straight opera seria, then there would have been no question about the ending.  "The original couples would get back together because the social order demands a happy ending and the social order must be preserved," Minter said.  But coming hard on the heels of 'Figaro' that very disruptive play and opera, 'Cosi' combines elements of opera seria and comic singspiel and is therefore more "ambiguous."

Among the complexities of the opera is the character Don Alfonso, Minter says.   Usually played "as a buffoon," Alfonso is "the real tragedy of the piece.  He is the philosopher.  Although he sets up the comedy, we are trying to imagine him as someone who was once realy hurt.  Originally there was an aria for Alfonso which no longer exists," the director said.  The solo might well have illuminated the character more completely.  But Minter sees a glimpse of the older man remembering a lost love in a first act recitative.  "His bitterness is not flippant, but comes of deep wounds."

And from the Boston Herald, (August 6, 2000):

"Director Drew Minter updated the tale of two men testing the fidelity of their fiancees by setting the work in a modern tennis club...Minter's staging was clever and detailed.  He was helped immensely by the libretto, translated deliciously into rhyming couplets...for this summer evening, it was a blast.  It was a laugh a minute, with inspired sight gags and excellent blocking.  One thing is certain, Mozart would have loved it."