Yeah a Traditional Così Fan Tutte-Well Sort Of

[lennygoran]

Review: A Happy Ending in LoftOpera’s ‘Così Fan Tutte,’ With an Edge

By ZACHARY WOOLFE SEPT. 19, 2016


Cruel love games among the upper crust. Relationships nurtured by shared deceptions. Illusions shattered like cold water tossed in your face. Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” is the only opera I know that could do double duty as an Edward Albee play, and LoftOpera’s production of that work on Saturday, the day after Albee’s death, was an unexpectedly proper memorial.

But how does the opera end? After two young men disguise themselves, successfully seduce each other’s girlfriends, then reveal the con, who goes home with whom? Do the new pairings turn out to be the right ones? Does everyone leave in disgust, alone? Does one of the women finish the opera about to kill herself?

I’ve seen all of these options staged. A lot of directors these days want to prove the darkness and rigor of their takes on the piece by avoiding a happy ending and severing the old couples irreparably.

But in this case the happy ending may be the harder, realer one. Mozart’s characters learn all there is to know about the people they love, and they reconcile anyway. Life goes on, together. It’s like the end of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”: After a night of battle, Martha asks, “Just … us?”

George, her husband, answers, “Yes.”

Directed by Louisa Proske, who brings the original lovers back together at the end, LoftOpera’s “Così” includes healthy doses of the bitterness in this most bitter of operas. But it manages to do that without stinting on the humor and lightness that are also crucial to the piece.

LoftOpera’s casting is, as usual, acute: For a staging set among high schoolers — appropriate for this tale of innocence yielding to experience — the company selected four singers who could pass for teenagers, the boys goofy and the girls preening.

The buttery, booming baritone Alex DeSocio (Guglielmo) and the ringing, elegant tenor Spencer Viator (Ferrando) were particularly fine, awkwardly toggling between fresh-faced overconfidence and dumbfounded hurt. Megan Pachecano sang Fiordiligi with a lucid soprano, blending easily with the soft-grained mezzo of Sarah Nelson Craft (Dorabella).

Overseen by Don Alfonso (Gary Ramsey), here a sinister teacher who urges the plot on, and his sidekick, the uproarious cleaning woman Despina (Michelle Trovato), the kids’ interactions were gentle, tender. So was Dean Buck’s conducting of the fine orchestra: The comedy was there, but it was never cartoonish.

Despite being staged in a corner of a vast warehouse in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, this “Così” felt intimate, heartfelt. There were glimmers here — the drug use, the animal masks — of Christopher Alden’s 2012 “Così” for New York City Opera. If LoftOpera’s was generally a cuddlier version of the work, its ending, however happy, hardly resolved all tensions. We are kept together, the audience learned once again, by our ability to hurt each other.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/20/arts/ ... front&_r=0