Women are constitutionally incapable of being faithful to their male partners.
That is, ostensibly, the unsavory message of Mozart's "Così fan tutte," making the 1790 opera an especially prickly proposition in the 21st century.
Except that Skylark Opera Artistic Director Robert Neu doesn't view the piece that way. In his new staging at St. Paul's Historic Mounds Theatre, he makes the women strong and the men increasingly immature and thoughtless.
Neu's approach has plenty of advantages for making "Così" less of a museum piece in terms of gender equality.
The action is updated to the present. The English text is laced with contemporary references. Neu also ditched the accompanied passages that link arias, replacing them with spoken dialogue of his own writing. These decisions give considerable immediacy to the tale of two young men who lay a bet against their fiancées betraying them — even before taking part in a scheme devised to test the two sisters.
Lopping half a century off the age of the scheme's deviser, Don Alfonso, is another sharp alteration. An "old philosopher" in Mozart's original, Don Alfonso becomes the same age as young Ferrando and Guglielmo in Neu's adaptation. A glossy-suited SoHo art dealer, the character is determined to prove that women are terminally fickle. The toxic masculinity that seals the wager is initially played out over clinking beer bottles on a thrust extension to the main stage.
As Ferrando and Guglielmo, Laurent Kuehnl and Justin Spenner brought a boisterous comic energy to their onstage machinations.
Donning "disguises" in an attempt to seduce each other's partner, the pair were particularly convincing. Spenner went for a "Spinal Tap" wannabe, complete with air guitar, while Kuehnl romped around in a hokey cowboy outfit — how could their girlfriends not be fascinated?
