How smart is this? You're staging a grand, gigantic, dramatic comedy set to music — about a 15th-century lothario but in a musical format that isn't exactly topping today's charts. You want to freshen it up a bit for new audiences but don't want to reinvent it so much that you upset opera patrons who adore the seventh most-performed piece in the repertoire. What do you do? If you are the St. Petersburg Opera Company and artistic director Mark Sforzini, you find a brilliant compromise: Make Don Giovanni a senator and give the piece, with its themes of seduction and power and the supernatural, a connection to modern audiences bombarded with this year's candidate coverage. Mozart's opera is considered the greatest telling of the Don Juan tale, and this staging (performed in Italian with English supertitles and with live orchestral accompaniment by FloriMezzo) should be exciting to watch, for opera and political fans alike. June 13-17, 7:30 p.m. Fri. and Tues., 2 p.m. Sun., Palladium Theater, 253 Fifth Ave. N., St. Petersburg, $18.50-$60, 727-822-3590, stpeteopera.org.
This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2008.