★★★★½
A red petrol pump stands at stage left. It looks like scenery, a piece of period detail. Then you remember Chekhov: do not place a gun on stage unless somebody is going to use it. Opera Australia’s touring Don Giovanni does use the pump. By the end, it has become this production’s answer to hell.
That is the ingenuity of a national tour. How do you stage a stone Commendatore rising from a graveyard? How do you send Don Giovanni into eternal fire when the entire production must fit inside a truck? You stop trying to imitate a metropolitan spectacle. You find another image.
Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s opera premiered in Prague in 1787. This Michael Gow production was first performed in Dandenong in 2012. It now returns for Opera Australia’s 30th modern national tour.
Across those three decades, the tour has presented more than 720 performances to over 330,000 people in 139 locations. South Australia does not have the same chain of large regional cities found across Victoria or New South Wales. That makes the Barossa Valley, the home of Maggie Beer and Grant Burge, a clever destination.
The Barossa Arts Centre is only about an hour north of Adelaide. City audiences can turn the opera into a day trip through one of the world’s great food and wine regions. People travelling from further north also gain access to a national company without having to continue into the city. The venue is not a consolation prize; it is an excellent home for this production.
Opera Australia’s arrival feels like an operatic circus rolling into town. The set comes out of one semitrailer; local technicians join the company. A familiar theatre becomes a cracked Mediterranean square. For one night, the travelling world becomes local.
Robert Kemp’s set and costumes turn touring limitations into dramatic language. His program note calls necessity the mother of invention. That is exactly what happens here.
One exterior serves the whole opera. The walls around a small hotel have a damaged veneer. Bricks show through the cracks. The sign flickers on and off. Tables, doors and steps become places for plotting, seduction and surveillance.
Matthew Scott’s lighting does much of the scene changing. Warm oranges make the square feel dusty and exposed. Deep blues transform the same walls into a place of secrecy and danger.
Michael Gow describes a small Spanish town. Kemp openly draws from Italian cinema and the excitability of Fellini’s characters. On stage, the distinction matters less than the shared Mediterranean claustrophobia.
Everybody knows everybody. Everybody watches, everybody judges. That gives the ending its power. The traditional cemetery statue is replaced by posters commemorating the murdered Commendatore. The dead man haunts the town through images and memory.
When judgment arrives, it is not divine. The townspeople come for Giovanni. They pour petrol over him and drag him into the wings. A brutal blaze of light erupts beyond the set. We never see his body burn. What we do not see is more disturbing.
Gow turns divine punishment into vigilante justice. It resembles an honour killing carried out by a community defending its social order. The town has endured Giovanni’s aggression, but its solution is another act of collective violence.
Eddie Muliaumaseali’i gives the Commendatore the stature and vocal presence to unleash the gates of hell.
The staging first appeared before #MeToo and before Jeffrey Epstein became the defining symbol of elite male impunity. It carries a different charge now.
Christian Haotian Qi’s Giovanni is not a cartoon villain. He moves through the town with the smarmy confidence of someone who has rarely heard the word no. Is he sexually liberated? Compulsively promiscuous? Addicted to conquest? Or simply a predator who disguises entitlement as freedom? The opera refuses an easy answer.
The Don Juan fantasy remains alive in the manosphere, where accumulating women is sold as proof of masculine value. Dating apps have also gamified desire. Every new match promises another small burst of dopamine. Leporello’s catalogue can now sound less like rakish legend than an addiction spreadsheet.
Yet the social order opposing Giovanni is hardly ideal. Marriage was treated as sacred when the opera was written, but it was often an economic and patriarchal contract. In “Batti, batti, o bel Masetto”, Zerlina offers herself to her jealous husband’s punishment to regain his affection. The alternative to Giovanni’s appetite is not necessarily freedom.
Cathy-Di Zhang and Benjamin Del Borrello make Zerlina and Masetto the production’s most convincing couple. Their chemistry is volatile, funny and physical.
Zhang has a warm, expansive soprano. She maintains remarkable vocal control even while reclining across Masetto’s arms. Her singing carries both sensuality and emotional intelligence.
Del Borrello gives Masetto the crazed fire of a thwarted lover. His delivery of “Signor, sì” is spat out with enough venom to briefly strip Giovanni of his social authority.
Christian Haotian Qi brings an elegant lyric baritone and refined stage presence to the title role. “Deh, vieni alla finestra” is a highlight. Its softness becomes part of Giovanni’s danger. He does not need to force every seduction; he can make desire sound reasonable.
Kiran Rajasingam is an excellent comic counterweight as Leporello. His voice is rich, but he also has the timing and physical ease to keep the long evening moving.
A scene in which he imitates Giovanni from one knee beneath a window is especially funny. He completes the transformation by sticking on a pair of aviator sunglasses. It is a tiny gag, but it tells us everything about the master-servant relationship.
Chelsea Burns is a vision in Donna Elvira’s enormous red dress, black hat and gloves. Her acting in the opening scenes establishes the mayhem to come. Elvira is wounded, furious and still disastrously hopeful.
Celeste Lazarenko brings impressive agility to Donna Anna. The control of her trills ensures her grief remains vocally disciplined without becoming emotionally remote.
Tomas Dalton gives Don Ottavio a commanding presence. His instrument leans towards a more dramatic tenor sound than the prettiest Mozart tradition. That is not a problem when the music expands. He delivers the long lines and larger notes of “Dalla sua pace” with assurance.
Simon Bruckard’s orchestral reduction is central to the whole touring enterprise. The forces cannot reproduce the scale of a long Festival Theatre season. They do not need to. The reduced orchestra keeps Mozart mobile. It leaves the voices exposed and the comedy alert.
A comparison with a fully resourced State Opera South Australia production would miss the point. This show was built to move. The same scenery must fit stages with different widths, depths and machinery. It must be erected and packed away in a day.
The costumes must also survive travel, cleaning and rotating casts. Each is duplicated and individually fitted. Kemp uses those limits as character shorthand.
Giovanni and Elvira receive the greatest glamour. He wears his scarlet jacket like a declaration. She enters in enough magenta fabric to consume the town square.
Leporello’s leather jacket and flat cap mark him as a worker. Ottavio’s yellow vest and spectacles make him look decent but slightly stranded. Zerlina’s lace wedding dress glows under the changing light. Few costume changes are needed; a great deal is achieved with very little.
The same is true of the Regional Children’s Chorus. Fifteen young Barossa singers, led by Mel Craford, perform beside Opera Australia’s artists. The program has involved more than 3,500 children over 13 years. Some will remember the applause for the rest of their lives. The benefit extends beyond the children. Parents, teachers, relatives and local musicians become connected to the production.
A visiting opera is no longer something dropped into a town and removed the following morning. The community has a stake in it. That may be the national tour’s most important achievement.
Driving up from Adelaide, it is possible to notice what is missing. No monumental graveyard, no elaborate descent into a mechanical underworld.
Imagine the same truck arriving in a town hundreds of kilometres from a capital city. Imagine the hotel rising inside the local theatre. The lights warm. Mozart begins. Local children walk onto the stage beside national artists. Then the limitations look very different: they look like invention.
Opera Australia’s Don Giovanni is a seduction into another world. It arrives with a cracked wall, a few beautiful dresses, a pair of aviators and one ominous petrol pump. That is more than enough to start a fire.
Don Giovanni is presented by Opera Australia and is touring throughout South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania and New South Wales in July and August 2026.
See full dates and book tickets at the website link here.
Website: https://www.stateopera.com.au/productions/2026/don-giovanni
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/operaaustralia/ and https://www.instagram.com/stateoperasouthaustralia/
Photo credits: Claudio Raschella
