Who would presume to improve upon Mozart? Certainly not Dominique Serrand, artistic director of Minneapolis's award-winning Theatre de la Jeune Lune, who co-conceived
Don Juan Giovanni and Figaro, a pair of operatic pastiches currently on view at Harvard's American Repertory Theatre. Admiration clearly fuels Serrand's hybridized concoctions. He comes not to one-up the master, but to play with him. Still, the experiment proves to be a 50-50 proposition.

Of the two productions -- both presented within a spacious white box of a stage, virtually bare but for a screen on which closeups and flashbacks are projected -- Figaro, a 2003 production riffing on the opera and the trilogy of Beaumarchais[...]