Mozart’s Don Giovanni: A Rock Opera

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Ambition, that perilous double-edged sword, can elevate a work of art to soaring heights—or leave it flailing in the rafters, reaching desperately for resonance it cannot quite grasp. Such is the case with Mozart’s Don Giovanni: A Rock Opera, Adam B. Levowitz’s audacious and heartfelt, if uneven, adaptation of Mozart’s canonical masterpiece. This leaner, louder take on Don Giovanni, recognizing the latent synergy between operatic grandeur and rock bravado, now playing at The Cutting Room through August 26, replaces the classical orchestra with a ten-piece rock band and pares down the original three-hour-plus opera to a taut two hours and ten minutes. If only its dramatic momentum had received the same rigorous attention as its runtime.

Let us begin with Levowitz’s most successful feat: the orchestrations. The musical backbone of this production thrums with life, thanks to his inventive reimagining of Mozart’s score through the muscular idiom of rock. There’s electricity—literal and figurative—in the air. Guitars wail, drums thunder, and the ensemble of musicians delivers with a kinetic fervor that makes one believe, if only for a few glorious moments, that Wolfgang himself might have reveled in this sonic rebellion.

Alas, bold musical instincts alone do not an opera make. For all its sonic bravado, this production suffers from a libretto that feels oddly clipped and dramatically diffuse. Levowitz has, with some justification, taken the scalpel to Da Ponte’s original text. The libretto has been trimmed for time—a defensible choice—but not always judiciously. Entire subplots, including the earthy tale of peasant girl Zerlina and her hot-tempered fiancé Masetto, have been excised. Their absence drains the opera of its class tension and its potential for farcical romantic entanglements, while also sparing the production from grappling with its darkest themes. Levowitz replaces the attempted assault at a wedding that drives the first act finale with a vaguer incident, a decision that may sidestep controversy but also strips the work of some of its moral bite. In excising entire subplots and side characters, he has severed the connective tissue that lends coherence and emotional complexity to the narrative. The pacing suffers, and what remains is often puzzlingly disjointed.

The story, in its rock-adapted form, still follows the infamous Don Giovanni, that libidinous libertine whose charm curdles into villainy over the course of one long, increasingly supernatural night. But here, the character has been smoothed out. The predation that once made Giovanni such a provocatively loathsome figure has been softened into mere duplicity. He lies, yes—but he no longer coerces. While this shift may be ethically welcome, it leaves narrative holes in its wake. The motivations of the women around him, particularly Donna Elvira, become muddled. Her righteous fury gives way to tonal whiplash, as her affection and disgust toward Giovanni appear to alternate without cause. Likewise, the pivotal murder of the Commendatore is rendered with such ambiguity that Donna Anna’s failure to recognize Giovanni afterward feels less like a tragic dramatic irony and more like a scripting oversight.

The translation of the libretto into English, while commendable in its attempt to increase accessibility, yields mixed results. It has long been a given that English operatically sung is a bear compared to the phonetic beauty and lyricism of the usual romance languages, Portuguese and Romanian notwithstanding. Some lyrical passages ignite with genuine fire—Donna Anna’s searing aria of grief and rage stands out as a highlight—but many of the recitatives feel lethargic and clunky, their rhythmic propulsion lost in the shift to a less nimble tongue. These moments, which ought to carry the audience from one emotional peak to another, instead bog the show down, flattening the dramatic arc.

Levowitz, to his credit, peppers the text with metatheatrical flourishes that hint at a more subversive, self-aware vision of opera. Leporello, the long-suffering servant, breaks the fourth wall repeatedly—commenting on operatic conventions, even acknowledging his own role within the genre’s machinery. These moments are genuinely funny and potentially fertile ground for deeper commentary, but they remain tantalizingly underdeveloped. If Leporello is, in fact, the only character aware of the fiction he inhabits, there’s a rich Our Town stage manager potential here that Levowitz only begins to explore. With greater commitment, this device could sharpen the production’s satirical edge and clarify its aesthetic intentions.

Where the book falters, the performers redeem. Ryan Silverman is every inch the sexy seducer, his voice a golden baritone that sails effortlessly over the guitars. His Giovanni is all velvet swagger and slow-burning menace, Mozart’s infamous rake, reimagined as a strutting rock god, though one wishes the direction had given him more moments of true darkness to play. Richard Coleman’s Leporello is the evening’s comedic anchor, deadpan yet nimble, grounding the production with well-timed eye-rolls and well-earned laughs, but the tedious (and overly long) preamble to the evening is an unfortunate piece of business to saddle him with. Rachel Zatcoff lends Donna Elvira both vocal agility and fierce comic timing, particularly in her deliciously vindictive opening number.

Donna Anna’s father, the Commander (Edwin Jhamaal Davis), rushes out with a sword to defend her honor, but Giovanni quickly dispatches him. Davis provides the voice that gives us the true goosebumps of the night. His booming bass once the Commander is a statue invited to dine with Giovanni, an infernal climax in which the statue exacts divine retribution, is classic opera house fare.

In his portrayal of the emotionally scorched Ottavio—the cuckolded soul adrift in his own operatic lament—Felipe Barbosa Bombonato transcends mere performance, conjuring a tempest of raw, unabashed pathos. It is in the climactic strains of the second act’s ballad, “How Can I Comfort Her?,” that his artistry erupts most ferociously. With vocals that soar, plunge, and all but shatter the glassware, Bombonato hurls his torment across the venue like a man possessed—each anguished note a dagger, each breath a cry from the depths of romantic despair. His is not merely a song, but a wailing confession on the altar of lost love, delivered with such conviction and vocal ferocity that one almost expects the chandelier to tremble in sympathy.

Anchal Dhir as Donna Anna embodies the character’s psychological unraveling with gusto—though there are moments when her voice strains to compete with the band’s formidable volume, suggesting either a sound balance issue or simply an unforgiving acoustic environment.

And speaking of an unforgiving acoustic environment, The Cutting Room makes a poor business decision by having the performance in the dining room so close to their ongoing bar activities. On this critic’s evening, drinkers at the bar confused the performance in the dining room with a free-for-all singalong providing an unforgivable vocal intrusion not only for the paying audience but the performers as well.

And yet, despite its inconsistencies, Mozart’s Don Giovanni: A Rock Opera radiates promise. It is unmistakably a labor of love—one hears it in the orchestrations, sees it in the casting, and senses it in the risks Levowitz is willing to take, even when they don’t entirely pay off. With more rigorous dramaturgy, a clearer tonal compass, and stronger directorial coherence, this could evolve into something truly extraordinary: a feral, genre-blurring beast that breathes new life into the canon. One can only hope that the intervening months will bring refinement, reinvention, and the thrilling operatic madness this concept so clearly deserves.

For now, it is a work-in-progress worth watching—if not for what it is, then for what it still might become.

Mozart’s Don Giovanni: A Rock Opera (through July 13, 2025)

The Cutting Room, 44 East 32nd Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.ovationtix.com

Running time: two hours and ten minutes including one intermission