MOZART MINUS FINESSE : L.A. OPERA THEATER ESSAYS ‘DON GIOVANNI’ AT WILTERN

Great opera, good house, vast ambition, mediocre performance.

Tuesday night, the ever-scrappy Los Angeles Opera Theater ventured Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” at the renovated Wiltern Theatre. It was a nice try, but only a try.

To fail with this vast, complex, forbidding, fragile, wondrous masterpiece is no disgrace. On many an occasion, the Met has failed. On most occasions, the San Francisco Opera has failed. Even Salzburg, holy of holies, has failed on occasion.

“Don Giovanni”--that disconcerting fusion of the heroic and the trivial, the poignant and the charming, the realistic and the symbolic, the tragic and the comic--requires an ensemble of polished and stylish singing actors who happen to be blessed with brains, flexible voices and compelling, individualistic personalities.

The opera also requires an authoritative conductor who really savors the quasi-contradictory meaning of dramma giacoso ; a stage director who can make sense of inherent plot convolutions as well as period indulgences; a designer who can define time, place and, most important, mood, with economy, fluidity and elegance.

Even under the best of circumstances, the Los Angeles Opera Theater would have trouble meeting such requirements. The circumstances here were hardly the best.

The company cannot afford the greatest singers or the most elaborate decors. It has just moved to a big, untried home that used to be a movie palace. Moreover, the production in question was planned by Johanna Dordick--to whom it was dedicated--but it was executed after her resignation by Henry Holt.

The new artistic director, a sound administrator and an efficient maestro, inherited a generally inexperienced cast of young (or youngish) Americans and a production scheme that threatened to destroy the budget.

At short notice, Holt had to abandon the elaborate sets envisioned by Andreas Reinhardt and go shopping for replacement decors. After what must have been much gnashing of teeth and other gnashables, he came up with an all-purpose-and-no-purpose unit set by Miguel Romero.

It consisted of three glossy-white structures atop a shiny- black rake. It looked handsome. Unfortunately, despite resourceful lighting by Russell Pyle, it failed to accommodate the action.

At the left, Romero gave us a stately Grecian portal; at the right a Baroque facade with a tiny balcony; in the middle he plunked a phallic obelisk. At one time or another, these disparate pieces were supposed to represent the Commendatore’s courtyard, a rustic meadow, a castle garden, a ballroom, a graveyard, Donna Anna’s chambers, the Don’s banquet hall and even the portable gates of hell.

They didn’t. They couldn’t.

Complicating matters further, Reinhardt’s costumes moved the action from the 17th Century to the 19th, for no apparent reason. In the process, Reinhardt made the peasants look anachronistically chic, and he allowed the noble Elvira to make her entrance sporting trousers and a whip--as if she had ridden to Seville atop a Lippizaner stallion.

Given an ensemble of novices and an inhospitable scenic milieu, Hans Hartleb, the director, cast himself cautiously. A well-versed routinier from Germany, he decided to play traffic cop. If he harbored any revealing ideas about the characters and their predicaments, he kept those ideas a secret.

The evening still might have been salvaged, to some extent, had the stage been dominated by charismatic personalities or by virtuoso singers. No such luck.

Whether making love or war, Jeffrey Wells in the title role settled for loud, gruff, dark sounds accompanied by generalized macho poses. Incidentally, the poor fellow didn’t even get a mandolin upon which to accompany himself in the Serenade. We heard it in the pit, but we didn’t see it.

Kay Griffel introduced a tremulous Donna Anna who mustered no power for “Or sai chi l’onore” and nearly came to grief in the fiorature of “Non mi dir.” Constance Cloward revealed the brightest vocal promise, but her technique seemed unequal to Elvira’s florid demands. A bland Deborah McClung looked oddly sophisticated as the earthy Zerlina, and her tiny soprano, when audible, tended toward the edgy.

Jonathan Mack, the Don Ottavio, returned from Dortmund with his vaunted artistry intact. He even offered some embellishment during the repeat of “Dalla sua pace.” But his tenor is neither as steady nor as well-focused as it used to be.

Michael Gallup offered an amiable, solid Leporello, without stressing the humor, the cleverness or the possible pathos of the character. Richard Cowan portrayed a stock Masetto, Francesco Sorianello a less-than-terrifying (ultimately amplified) Commendatore.

Contrary to previous L. A. Opera Theater policy, the Americans sang the jokes and the introspective monologues and the philosophical exchanges in Italian, for a non-comprehending American audience. So much for the cause of enlightenment.

Holt stirred the musical pot with consideration for the larynxes at his disposal, with poise and obvious dedication to the cause. He sustained momentum throughout a long evening and, although he was inconsistent when it came to appoggiaturas, provided neat continuo accompaniment on the forte-piano.

He didn’t do much, however, to reinforce the flights of ethereal lyricism, the graceful heroic reflections or the cataclysmic passions. He let the exquisite “Mask” trio just bobble along briskly. He let “Il mio tesoro” resemble a race to the cadence, and he let the statue of the Commendatore summon Don Giovanni to hell as if the destination were a tea party.

By default, the star of the evening turned out to be the Wiltern Theatre itself. One could quibble about the heat, or about the sight-lines downstairs. The soundlines, however, were remarkably clear, resonant and flattering on the orchestra level, and at the front of the balcony, they were even more than that. It bodes well.