Don Giovanni - a gay reworking set in Heaven

This April, at London’s Heaven nightclub, producer Richard Crichton and director Dominic Gray present a radical reworking of Mozart’s enduring opera about sex, class and damnation. This production will take Mozart to a new audience and reinvent Don Giovanni himself as a gay, debauched playboy and nightclub owner in the heady world of the 1980s. The opera is performed in a new English translation by Ranjit Bolt.

Inspired by New York's legendary Studio 54 and Matthew Bourne’s all-male Swan Lake, Crichton has reversed the gender of all the roles except that of the Don, played here by baritone Duncan Rock. The production adheres closely to the class-based delineation of the characters of the original opera: Alan (Donna Anna) is a younger closeted man from a wealthy and privileged background; Eddie (Donna Elvira) is a middle-class openly gay man who works in the City; and Zac (Zerlina) is a working-class lad from Milton Keynes who is visiting the city with his new fiancée, Marina (Masetto). Set against these three men are Olivia (Don Ottavio), in love with her best friend Alan, despite his homosexuality, Petra (the Commendatore), Alan's imposing mother and Leo (Leporello), Don Giovanni’s female PA. Together, these characters present a strong and credible cross-section of London life.

This relocation of the sexual roles fits the moral landscape of Don Giovanni very acutely. The Don’s pursuit of an endless series of purely sexual adventures and his indulgence in sensuality of all kinds lends itself to a gay world as readily as to a heterosexual one. The opera in this presentation retains the sense of both the attraction and the fundamentally disruptive nature of unbridled sexual desire. Richard Crichton explains how the inspiration for the production came to him after hearing Leporello’s catalogue aria, listing Don Giovanni’s conquests: ‘in Italy, six hundred and forty; in Germany, two hundred and thirty-one; a hundred in France; in Turkey, ninety-one; but in Spain already one thousand and three.’ ‘I had a friend’, says Crichton, ‘who had way more lovers than that… The penny finally dropped. Although the idea started as a bit of a joke, here was a story which actually reflected real life.’