Don Giovanni at The Met is Not Hot
By Isabella Ruiz
I attended the Met Opera’s 2025 Production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, so you don’t have to. Here’s why you definitely shouldn’t.
For many New Yorkers, a night at the Metropolitan Opera is less about arias and more about having an excuse to wear that show-stopping outfit that has been waiting patiently in the back of the closet. For me, attending the Met Opera’s 2025 Production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni was a mandatory class trip, an experience I strongly disliked.
Overall, the show was not awful. The light at the end of the tunnel was a single performer, Ben Bliss, who portrays an astonishing Don Ottavio. Ottavio is a character with little development and arias that are boring on paper. However, my entire class agreed that Bliss’s performance completely defied the setbacks of the show’s production quality.
Don Giovanni is historically grandiose, both musically and thematically, and this is precisely where the Met missed the mark. Firstly, the costuming completely offset the decent quality of the performance. While viewers could still identify the characters’ status, there was no true fashion to the production. It was lazy, messy, and, for lack of a better word, chintzy. All characters in costume could have easily been cast in Macklemore’s Thrift Shop music video.
As a Gen-Zer, I can openly admit that our generation is guilty of deep-frying our own brains. With seemingly endless six-seven jokes and SoraAI plaguing our For You pages, one may argue it’s harder to pay attention to anything longer than a 60-second Instagram reel.
Now that I have acknowledged the obvious user error, the crux of the story is that the production is almost three and a half hours long.
I know, I know. That is one way to maximize the value of a ticket. Thankfully, I had a private university footing the bill for this occasion.
In addition to the length, my qualms persist with the show’s intermission. A 30-minute intermission allows for much more than a stretch of the legs and a swig of Cabernet: I was privileged enough to have options. I could’ve waited in the 25-minute bathroom line in the most uncomfortable shoes humanly possible, quenched my thirst with tap water from a deformed, pre-drenched cone paper cup, or even dozed off under the dull house lights that still make the very back of the theater feel pitch-black.
With lackluster costumes, a painfully long runtime, and the outdated venue’s lack of accommodations, the production is an overall disappointment, failing to deliver on what could have been an exciting and contemporary spin.
