Review: (Toronto) Così Fan Tutte

Tracy Dahl, Sir Thomas Allen (Photo: Michael Cooper)

Double Trouble
by Shannon Christy
Twitter User ID: schristy79

Mozart must have been hard to hang out with.  On one hand you have a musical genius and on the other you have a guy, who by modern standards would have had a fraternity sense of humour.  Still beyond his shenanigans and through his lighter works emerges a dark image of humanity where the illusion of individuality gives way to uniformity of human behaviour where all individuals are beholden to their base instincts.  This piece contains all of the above.

In Così Fan Tutte this notion emerges through the relationship of two couples Ferrando (Paul Appleby) and Dorabella (Wallis Giunta), and Guglielmo (Robert Gleadow) and Fiordiligi (Layla Claire).  Ferrando and Guglielmo challenge an indecent proposal from their friend Don Alfonso (Sir Thomas Allen) that all women are incapable of being faithful despite their oaths of allegiance and that given enough time and pressure all will submit to seduction.

Director Atom Egoyan has taken a slight spin away from the original fatalism versus individual freedom interpretation of Cosi Fan Tutte (everyone does things that way regardless of their will), and substitutes it for a more sexual liberating one where everybody is doing it (Mozart would have been proud).  To do this he has set our protagonists in a school dedicated to the art of seduction and transformed Don Alfonso from a philosopher to a professor.  In addition, Mr. Egoyan provides a motif of several different butterflies pinned and preserved and the image of Frida Kahlo’s Two Frida’s to illustrate that love is an ephemeral emotion that can cut the heart with surgical precision.  It is a very impressive imagery that sears into your consciousness.

Review: (Toronto) Cosi fan tutte

As Everyone Does
Mozart at UofT
by Axel Van Chee


Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte is a comedy, a farce on love on the surface, but the depth of human emotions, the anguish, the questioning, the sharp barb of sting is ever present. And it is one of those operas that the directors love to play with: it can be colourfully camp, to intriguingly avant garde, to calculatingly grotesque. The Opera Division at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music’s Cosi went with a traditional production set in a baroque- classical style marble mansion designed by Fred Perruzza, complete with topiaries, roman garden statues, candelabras, a host of house servants, and at one point, an elaborate gondola. With some ingenious directing by Michael Patrick Albano, what is playing at McMillan Theatre is possibly one of the funniest Cosi fan tuttes  I’ve seen, with just the right amount of hilarity without being vulgar, and still hangs on to the uncertainty which really is the backbone of the opera.