DON JUAN PROJECT
Bailiwick Repertory
Watching this production, you can see why. The play offers lots of action and the quintessential Andalusian lover–suave and stoic, handy with pistol and sword. In the first act he’s the arch defier of God and man and defiler of women, but by the second act Don Juan is chastened. His virtuous fiancee Dona Ines has died of a broken heart, and Don Juan is now obsessed with human suffering, daunted by the magnitude of a wartime massacre he witnessed. When Don Juan wannabes fell him, his rival Don Luis argues for the rake to be sent to hell, to teach him his insignificance before God. But in Zorrilla’s lyrical apotheosis, a still-adoring Dona Ines saves her dying lover, quenching his last gasps with a potion of immortality.
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Fox’s skilled quartet, all in full possession of their characters, superbly orchestrate Shaw’s symphony of ideas. Rob Nagle’s flawless Juan pours out a fast-flowing stream of eloquence; Michael Weber’s Devil (a part he’s played twice before) is a smooth-faced sybarite and an elegant antagonist; Kate Fry is winsome as Ana moves from bewilderment to conviction; and Don Blair’s bluff, no-nonsense Statue provides earthy common sense and comic relief.
More believable than this false fantasy are the catty bar denizens, neatly distinguished by Roberts’s pungent dialogue and the stylistic gamut of Barnes’s score, a pastiche that includes a country ballad, torch song, ragtime rouser, tango, and parodies of Jacques Brel and Cole Porter. Andy is needy, whiny, and as perky as a 30s chorus boy; leatherman/English teacher Jon knows the Man only through phone sex and the atrocious grammar of his semiliterate love letters; the aging Female Impersonator is decidedly not, he tells us, a drag queen; and Donna is a fag hag with a history of marrying gay men in haste and repenting in Reno.
