SHARON’S CONCEPT “COSI” BRILLIANT AND THEN DISASTROUS

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When the Detroit Free Press excoriated Yuval Sharon’s new AI-themed Cosi Fan Tutte at Detroit Opera, in which the women are robots designed by the men, it had it half-right. I was sold on the audacious concept in the first act, but the show went both south and overboard in the second. 

What sold me on it were these lines in the opening scene of Lorenzo Da Ponte's original libretto, which melded so well with the girls-are-robots concept that I forgave it all its excesses until midway into the second act:

Don Alfonso: 

"I'd only like to know 

What kind of creatures 

Are these beauties of yours, if they're flesh and blood and bone like us, 

If they eat like us, and wear skirts, 

If, in fact, they're goddesses or women..."


In Sharon's opera these lines are spoken just after we've been told that Don Alfonso is the CEO of a robot company, and that the women are being designed by the men. When I read these lines to people who saw they opera, but who had missed them as the action was underway, they couldn't believe they'd come from the original libretto and not been added by Yuval Sharon.

This set up a fascinating self-aware criticism of the original libretto, in which we are invited to differ from its precepts about what women are like.


Perhaps where Sharon went wrong was in arguing that his concept was consistent with Da Ponte's intent; in the second act he kept feeling the need to have his character of the Al CEO explain how each twist and turn was consistent with his premise. ("But doesn't that mean the experiment failed?" "Not at all," etc.) That was unnecessary, and lengthened the opera an uncomfortable 45 minutes over the length promised in the program. By the end Sharon seemed uninterested in the opera itself and too engaged in the contemporary play he wrote to frame it.


By the end Sharon admitted the wedding was completely inconsistent with his concept and had the CEO announce peevishly that he was just having a wedding performed because people like weddings.


If he'd left it as he began it, with the audience invited to respond to the opera itself rather than have it explained to them, his concept might have been successful.


However it was a thrill to see the audience dig it so enthusiastically. I had traveled a few hundred miles to see this company, having become frustrated with the extent to which directors in other markets have become badgered for the slightest conceptual innovation. Sharon has built an opera scene that is the antedote to that mindset, and that challenges us to think about these multi-century-old librettos in ways that don't merely repeat the sins of the past but allow us to use the operas to think critically about the present and the future. He has a youthful following that was with him all the way to the end of his audacious production that is like no place else in the country.


Tony Kushner once said playwriting should be like a good lasagna - so packed and layered and juicy and over the top that it almost falls down. This opera did fall down in the second act, but it was a thrill to watch the chef try to apply Kushner's lasagna aesthetic to opera.


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