Strange things can happen when you go to an outdoor opera performance. Halfway through Act One of Mozart's "Così fan Tutte" at the Mill City Museum ruins in downtown Minneapolis on Sunday evening, a public address announcement cut into the music and called all the actors and musicians offstage.
A few spots of rain threatened, but a shower failed to develop. Twenty minutes later the show restarted, without the orchestra, only to shut down again when some real rain fell.
In the hourlong interval that followed, the singers moved indoors to the museum lobby, where they skipped the first-act finale and performed Act Two with a selection of props and a keyboard.
It was a hugely frustrating evening for the Mill City Summer Opera singers, who coped gallantly with the constant interruptions. The 40 minutes of fully staged action in Act One had developed an intriguing momentum before the elements turned murky.
This "Così" was the inaugural production of Mill City Summer Opera's new artistic director, Crystal Manich, who updated the opera from the 18th century to 1940s Italy.
In her reframing, the young blades Ferrando and Guglielmo are recently discharged soldiers returning to a town where bomb damage is evident and the inhabitants exude a zoned-out, post-traumatic languor.
Their sweethearts Fiordiligi and Dorabella have an edgy appetite for the amorous excitements denied them during war, and are cruelly disappointed when their fiancés are apparently recalled to front-line duty. It's all a grisly ruse, designed by Don Alfonso and the boys to test the girls' fidelity in a thoughtlessly laid wager.
Manich turns Don Alfonso into a disheveled ex-general with a drinking habit, who concocts the grubby scheme more out of boredom than any sense of malice. Baritone Andrew Wilkowske made an unusually sympathetic impression as Alfonso, somehow managing to suggest that for all his cynical maneuvering of the callow youthful lovers he is ultimately doing them a favor. He sang splendidly, and managed to survive the sweltering humidity in a distinctly unseasonal military uniform.
