Word: harlem
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...question now arises at the Pepsico Summerfare festival in Purchase, N.Y., where Sellars' versions of the three operas that Mozart wrote with Lorenzo da Ponte are all being restaged. The Marriage of Figaro (1786) is set in Manhattan's Trump Tower, Don Giovanni (1787) in Spanish Harlem and Cosi fan tutte (1790) in a sleazy diner called Despina's. Nor does the Sellars game end ) there. At 31, the aging enfant terrible is talking of deconstructing Idomeneo in Brussels and The Magic Flute at Glyndebourne...
...illustrates a more fundamental problem. Don Giovanni is at least partly a drama of class distinctions. That is why, for example, the cavalier can simply walk in on the wedding of the peasant Masetto and walk off with his bride Zerlina. When Don Giovanni is converted into an East Harlem hoodlum, the character no longer fits the plot, so Sellars blithely begins changing various details of the story...
Just as Sellars' transfer of Don Giovanni to a phantasmagorical Spanish Harlem really tells us very little about Harlem, it also tells us nothing new about Don Giovanni. There have been so many changes in plot and character that Giovanni is no longer Mozart's defiant hero but a quite different and less interesting character of Sellars' creation. In the intensely dramatic finale, for example, he is not dragged unrepentant to hell by the statue of the man he murdered but rather led there, while groveling in his underwear, by a young girl in what looks like a Communion dress...
...Giovanni in Spanish Harlem? Figaro in Trump Tower? Why? A skeptical view of Peter Sellars' zany productions of three Mozart-Da Ponte works...
...director's fascination with cinema blossomed at Morehouse, where he was the third generation of Lees to attend the all-black college. During the summer of 1977, Lee made his first film: he drove around Brooklyn and Harlem the day after the New York City blackout and filmed the looting. Even then, Lee's cinematic eye was drawn to the absurdity of events that unfolded around him. "In a lot of ways it was funny to me, like Christmas," he says. "People were walking out of stores with color...