Don Giovanni, Opera North, Leeds - Seven magazine review Portraying the last day in the life of a serial seducer, Don Giovanni is one of opera's most hectic masterpieces. As such, the last thing that Mozart and Da Ponte's dramma giocoso needs is an elegant staging, but a recent parade of messy productions has only confirmed this notoriously difficult work's reputation as a director's graveyard. For now, this Don Giovanni is stuck at the end of a pier, with a Punch and Judy theme that gives this performance (sung in Italian by a British cast) a rather confusing English slant: in the circumstances, Alastair Miles's vocally strong but whiskery Leporello makes some sense, though William Dazeley's uncharismatic Don Giovanni is still too genteel. Turning Masetto's group of vengeance-bent peasants into a group of snorting pigs, and trying to enliven Don Ottavio's goody two-shoes image by having him steal from the Commendatore's corpse, are ideas that are never followed through - despite potentially interesting costuming that tries to tell a tale of Fifties plebs versus Victorian toffs. As the woman who really loves Giovanni, Donna Elvira (the bright-toned Elizabeth Atherton) seems to bridge both worlds. When the best singing in Don Giovanni comes from Zerlina, here the sparky Claire Wild, something is wrong, and indeed Meeta Raval's Donna Anna sounds distressingly squally. Tobias Ringborg enforces good Mozartian values in the pit. At Leeds to Nov 1, then touring to Nov 24, www.operanorth.co.uk