A jukebox opera isn’t a bad idea. The Met pulled it off last year with “The Enchanted Island,” which borrowed plotlines from a couple of Shakespeare plays and stuffed them with baroque arias by various composers.
Now comes “The Giacomo Variations,” an Austrian import that mashes up elements from Casanova’s diaries with excerpts from three Mozart operas. The link? The librettos for those operas were by Lorenzo Da Ponte, who happened to be a friend of the legendary seducer.
Pity this leaden concoction goes down like a Viennese cake whose buttercream has gone sour.
The big draw actually isn’t the singing or the Orchester Wiener Akademie — flown in by the presenting Cherry Orchard Festival, a new outfit pairing fuzzy artistic direction with deep pockets.
No, the most interesting thing about the show is that Giacomo Casanova is played by John Malkovich — reuniting with writer-director Michael Sturminger after BAM’s 2011 “The Infernal Comedy.”
Malkovich is one of America’s most distinctive actors, and here his soft voice and unique cadence give our narrator a deceiving softness.
At the same time, this is a familiar performance, and it doesn’t add much to Malkovich’s gallery of suave fiends. It’s also muddled by echoey amplification, and overall just not enough to keep us awake through this confusing, lifeless hodgepodge of a show.
The idea is that the arias illustrate points from Casanova’s life, as he interacts with women — all played by Ingeborga Dapkunaite, while baritone Daniel Schmutzhard and soprano Sophie Klussmann handle the music.
The singing is adequate, but without much context the arias have little life. Worse, they’re often undermined by embarrassing attempts at humor, as when Casanova brandishes a large condom during “Cinque . . . dieci . . . venti” from “Le Nozze di Figaro.”
And then there’s the boy who turns out to be a girl, thanks to some realistically molded rubber — which Casanova also ends up gleefully waving around. Just . . . no.