Indiana University of Pennsylvania's Music Theater will present the opera Don Giovanni (Don Juan), with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. This fully-staged version of the opera with a sci-fi twist will take place on February 27-29 at 7:30 p.m. and March 1 at 2:00 p.m. on the Waller Hall Mainstage of the IUP Performing Arts Center and will feature the IUP Opera Festival Orchestra. It will be sung in English.
Don Giovanni is based on the legend of Don Juan. The opera, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, premiered in 1787 in Prague and has gone on to be one of the most successful operas of all time, each year ranking in the top 10-produced operas worldwide. Da Ponte was an Italian librettist and worked for the Austrian emperor and the King's Theater in England. He later immigrated to the US and lived in New York and Pennsylvania. He was a professor of Italian and introduced Don Giovanni to American audiences.
IUP faculty member and director of Opera and Music Theater, Oliver Lo, serves as the producer and director for this production of Don Giovanni (Don Juan). Alexandra Dee serves as the conductor for the IUP Opera Festival Orchestra with Stanley Chepaitis as concert master. Joan Van Dyke serves as choreographer.
In describing his thoughts on the upcoming production, Lo remarked, “Class differences and inequality have been a topic for plays and operas for years. Because of censorship, the librettist sometimes needed to ‘hide' their theme by using comedy. Don Giovanni is definitely one of the famous and successful operas to explore this serious topic using comedy. How the inequality was ‘fixed' in this opera was something that is both unexpected and desperate.”
Lo continued, asking, “We all want justice, but can it be done?”
Tickets for this event are available for purchase online through the Lively Arts website or by calling the ticket hotline at 724-357-1313. They can also be purchased at the Performing Arts Center Ticket Office in Fisher Auditorium. Any seats remaining will be sold at the door starting one hour prior to the performance. Tickets are priced at $18 for regular admission, $15 for seniors and groups, and $12 for students and children. Online tickets are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The ticket hotline and ticket office in Fisher Auditorium are open from noon to 5:00 p.m. weekdays. The ticket office is closed for university holidays. To avoid a $3 ticket fee, tickets must be purchased in advance of the day of the show at the Performing Arts Center Ticket Office in Fisher Auditorium. For more information on this and other events as well as group tickets within the Lively Arts, call 724-357-2787 (ARTS) or email lively-arts@iup.edu.
Music Theater is produced by the Department of Music and the College of Fine Arts. It is funded, in part, by the IUP Student Cooperative Association.