Although the three operas were designed by Mozart and Da Ponte as completely separate, some stage directors endeavoured to produce them as a single story, in order to stress the continuities and echoes between them:
In 2015–2017, French director Ivan Alexandre produced the trilogy at the
Drottningholm Palace Theatre and the
Royal Opera of Versailles, with subsequent performances on tour. In his version, the lovelorn teenager Cherubino becomes the
libertine Don Giovanni, who then ages as the disillusioned but scheming Don Alfonso; at the end of Così, he designates as his libertine successor Despina, sung by the same singer as Cherubino, hinting at a cyclical nature of the story. Figaro and Leporello, both servants, are performed by the same singer, as they had been by
Francesco Benucci in 1786–1787. Musical quotations are added from the other operas, as Mozart himself had done when Don Giovanni’s house orchestra plays the popular tune of
Figaro’s aria.[3]
In 2020, Jean-Philippe Clarac and Olivier Delœil produced a cycle commissioned by
Peter de Caluwe at the
Royal Theatre of La Monnaie, Brussels. The three works are performed in a single set, a three-level open and rotating building inspired by
Georges Perec’s Life: A User's Manual, making it easier to interweave three libretti in a single twenty-four hour story. Twelve singers each played two of the twenty-five roles (for example Almaviva and Don Giovanni, the Countess and Donna Anna, or Cherubino and Dorabella), and some characters from one opera had short interventions in another, for which a few lines were redistributed to them. A
colour scheme identified the elements from each opera: the blue of temperance and constancy for the Marriage, the red of blood, violence and sex for Don Giovanni, and the yellow of betrayal for Così.[2][4]