Met Don Giovanni

I saw Don G last night at the Met and I'm still kind of in shock at the truly horrible staging. I understand it was very poorly reviewed last year and I'm wondering why the Met didn't do something about it? There are some very easy fixes IMO that would go a long way to making the performance a lot more coherent.

• The Don needs to be disguised/masked when he kills the Commendatore. The plot depends on Donna Anna coming to recognize Don G as the killer after she and Don Ottavio ask for his help. In this performance he isn't disguised at all.
• Costuming--pick a century and stay with it. The costumes were all over the place. The principal men wore mid-Century suits a la Mad Men. Donna Anna wore a very 1990s slip dress, Donna Elivra a 1940s peplum suit, and the rest of the cast wore something like 1930s shirt dresses right out of the dust bowl. And during the party scene Anna, Elvira and Ottavio are wearing 18th Century costumes, and there are mannequins brought out wearing 18th Century dresses and placed in niches in the brutalist set. Why? It was bananas. Pretty hard to get a sense of place and time with all this mix and match.
• Fixed brutalist apartment blocks--Just horrible, as everything was drab and grey, and no cemetery scene or statue there was just a flower in the floor, which looked massively stupid. At the end, the set is flipped around to show people living in the apartment block with curtains and flowers and bicycles, which also seems incredibly facile--yes, everything is right in the world, now that Don G has been dragged to hell. Just dumb.
• But the biggest WTF moment for me and my friend was when we are introduced to Zerlina, she and the other poor folk, writhe around on the floor in some sort of pantomime of "sexy time." It was in really poor taste and borderline offensive.

The singing saved the night for me. Ben Bliss was a standout in a fine, young cast who could really sing the material. The conducting as also quite fine, with really nice pacing. But that said, I won't ever see that staging at the Met again. It gave me the ick, big time.