At the Detroit Opera, Yuval Sharon reimagined Mozart’s tale of infidelity for the age of artificial intelligence; at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Barrie Kosky offered a fiercely expressive staging of Kurt Weill’s Weimar-era work.
By
Heidi Waleson
April 14, 2025 at 4:57 pm ET
Olivia Boen in Yuval Sharon’s AI-themed production of Mozart’s ‘Così fan tutte.’ PHOTO: AUSTIN T. RICHEY / DETROIT OPERA
Detroit
Mozart’s “Così fan tutte” is always a challenge: How does a director interpret its superficially misogynistic story—on a bet, two unsuspecting women are manipulated into trading lovers, the assumption being that women are inherently fickle—in a way that’s palatable to a contemporary audience? For his new production at the Detroit Opera, Yuval Sharon, the company’s innovative artistic director, has riffed on the opera’s subtitle, “The School for Lovers.” Don Alfonso (Edward Parks) is a tech CEO, and the opera is staged as a product launch for his company’s newest AI models of perfect female lovers who are undergoing the fidelity test in real time.
The framing device uses video and additional spoken text. Addressing the audience, the microphone-wielding Don Alfonso grandiosely positions his AI beings as the answer to all of humanity’s weaknesses. The conceit is clever and apt—at first. The set, a clinical white box, created by the design collective dots, morphs from laboratory to simulated locations with the aid of misty projections by Yana Biryukova and Hana S. Kim and candy-colored lighting by Yuki Nakase Link. Fiordiligi (Olivia Boen) and Dorabella (Emily Fons), covered in white automaton sheathing and costumed, hilariously, in outfits inspired by male fantasy, start out moving in awkward jerks, robot-style. As they acquire deeper consciousness, their movements grow smoother and more human.
Thomas Lehman, Edward Parks and Joshua Blue PHOTO: AUSTIN T. RICHEY / DETROIT OPERA
Mr. Sharon’s detailed direction keeps the concept consistent and often entertaining. In one of the funniest scenes, Fiordiligi’s declaration of steadfastness “Come scoglio” is staged in a gym, complete with elliptical machines; for the aria’s finale, she hoists a giant barbell, one-handed, over her head and tosses it at the suitors. She is a robot, after all.
The robot idea also fits the music for a while. In Act I, the women’s protestations always seem largely performative, no matter the staging concept. It’s only in Act 2, when they start to surrender, that the music expresses deeper feelings. One interpretation of “Così” is that the new pairings are actually more authentic than the original ones and the joke, however mean-spirited, is a means toward growth for all four lovers. This staging allows for some of that development: We get the real anguish of Fiordiligi’s “Per pietà” as she confronts that change in herself in the empty white box, now a human cruelly tested in a laboratory.
But Mr. Sharon, wedded to his misogynist CEO Don Alfonso, who has more interpolated scenes—and becomes increasing unhinged—in Act 2, doesn’t come up with a satisfying resolution within the opera’s rich, if tricky, original framework. Instead, he jettisons a sizable chunk of the score and tacks on an abrupt new ending. It may be the logical conclusion of Mr. Sharon’s ideas about the intersection of technology and human mutability, but it isn’t “Così.” Worse, it feels like a total letdown.
Mr. Lehman, Ann Toomey and Mr. Blue, standing; Emily Fons and Ms. Boen, seated. PHOTO: AUSTIN T. RICHEY / DETROIT OPERA
On the plus side, the cast was excellent, particularly in their skillful navigation of the opera’s many vocal ensembles. Ms. Boen was electrifying in the two Fiordiligi arias; Ms. Fons brought a nicely contrasting brightness to the more fun-loving Dorabella. As the male lovers, Thomas Lehman displayed an eloquent baritone as Guglielmo and Joshua Blue’s tenor was a bit gravelly as Ferrando. Mr. Parks did a valiant job with his spoken CEO role as well as Don Alfonso’s sung contributions; Ann Toomey was a vocally underpowered but game Despina, the maid and Alfonso’s confederate. Conductor Corinna Niemeyer kept the pace lively.
Constanze Becker, Maeve Metelka and Tilo Nest in ‘The Threepenny Opera.’ PHOTO: RICHARD TERMINE
Brooklyn, N.Y.
In early April, New York audiences finally got the chance to experience the theatrical alchemy of the Australian director Barrie Kosky when his Berliner Ensemble production of Kurt Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera” visited the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Mr. Kosky, who spent 10 years (2012-22) as artistic director at the Komische Oper Berlin, has a gift for shaking up works that seem set in amber, delving deep into their hearts and those of the audience. For example, his anxious, dark “Fiddler on the Roof,” brought to Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2022, explored its theme of a community displaced while retaining its comedy.
His “Threepenny,” performed in the original German with supertitles, has that same polyphonic tapestry of darkness and light. There’s Weimar-style cabaret, with spangly curtains, follow spots, and the characters addressing the audience directly in eye-catching costumes. But these mostly criminal denizens of London must climb through a jungle-gym set and perch precariously in its niches before scrambling off. (Rebecca Ringst designed the set, Dinah Ehm the costumes, and Ulrich Eh the lighting.) It allows equal space for Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann’s harsh text—“The world is poor and man’s a s— / And that is all there is to it” is a typical lyric—and Weill’s seductive tunes.
Dialogue delivery was speedy and unsentimental, the singing direct and fierce, yet the music expressed underlying, impossible yearning. The arresting cast included Constanze Becker as Mrs. Peachum, elegant in a fur coat, drawling the “Ballad of Sexual Obsession”; Tilo Nest, tough as Mr. Peachum, her underworld-kingpin husband; Laura Balzer as Lucy Brown, trilling an operatic parody about poisoning her rival Polly (the ebullient Maeve Metelka); Bettina Hoppe as the rueful whore Jenny; Kathrin Wehlisch, in gender-bent casting, as the police chief Tiger Brown, Macheath’s old friend and one of his several betrayers; and Josefin Platt, wickedly crooning the “Morität” (“Mack the Knife”). Gabriel Schneider’s Macheath, a Don Giovanni who gets reprieved instead of sent to hell, ends with a spotlit cabaret turn while the others go off into darkness. The brassy seven-member band headed by Adam Benzwi on keyboards was overmiked into assaultive territory, but perhaps that too was the point.
Mr. Kosky’s first U.S.-based project was recently announced. A musical adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” for the Fisher Center at Bard—with a score by Mr. Benzwi and book and lyrics by Lisa Kron (“Fun Home”)—it will be rooted in Yiddish theater traditions. It is several years away. In the meantime, American opera houses should be bidding for his services.
Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).
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