(Photo Jennifer Baldwin Peden)
On the road with Mozart and Molière in Don Juan Giovanni
By: CAROLYN CLAY [The Phoenix, 4 September 2007]

In 1665, when it made a brief appearance before being suppressed for a couple of hundred years, Molière’s Don Juan was a “machine play” — noted for its elaborate stage mechanics. In Don Juan Giovanni, a 1994 amalgamation of Molière’s play and Mozart’s Don Giovanni into a philosophic confection with incidental music of the spheres, the machine is a functioning vintage Plymouth on a road trip to nowhere — it travels in circles, like the bike and the wheelchair that also figure in this Sisyphean sex addicts’ journey. Given the source material, the car should probably be a Citroën or a Fiat, but who’s quibbling?