Director Henry G. Akina and the Hawai'i Opera Theatre have produced another hit.

Friday's performance of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" (the character also known as Don Juan or Casanova) was light-hearted, fast-paced with delicious shock and frequent laughter.

Scenic Designer Peter Dean Beck, in co-production with Edmonton Opera, presented a single set, which offset the opera's wild action. Varied by means of a few moving parts and creative lighting, the set was monotone but surprisingly effective, suggesting a palazzo, a street, a country village, the gardens and interior of a villa, a cemetery, and so on.

Akina and Beck included gallerias on each side of the main piece.

During the overture, Don Giovanni's past lovers — lovers of all ages, genders, and sexual proclivities — visit his reveries, slowly filing into the gallerias to watch his life play out. The lovers observe as a silent past, reacting subtly to arias and actions on stage.

At the end, when Don Giovanni, thoroughly dissolute, has rejected all possibilities of redemption, they descend. ...

Well, there's no point in ruining the end — you have to see it.

There are eight characters, each representing a character type, a gender, a social stratum — and all crucial.

Today's favorites are often the peasants, vivid characters that require strong actors who provide most of the laughs: Leporello, Don Giovanni's servant (sung by bass Gustav Andreassen); Zerlina (soprano Mary Chesnut Hicks); and Masetto, Zerlina's fiance (bass Matt Boehler).

Andreassen stole the show time and again on Friday. Not only does his character have some of the best lines and the most catching arias, but Andreassen matched Leporello's comically appealing looks and brandy-warm voice, delivering an absolutely delightful performance.

Hicks had a rough entry with her upper range, but settled quickly into her role, capturing Zerlina's style, with her exceptionally strong acting, powerful voice, and rich lower range. Boehler, less powerful but with an appealing timbre, provided the perfect foil as the hapless Masetto.

The most often misunderstood are the aristocrats: Donna Anna (soprano Luz del Alba), her father Il Commendatore (bass Brian Jauhiainen), and her fiancé Don Ottavio (tenor George Dyer).

Cultured, educated, bound by propriety, and with impeccable carriage and manners, these characters can sometimes come across as ineffectual wimps, but they are decidedly not, even when they suffer a bit from Mozart's needling.

Del Alba's voice created a wonderfully complex Donna Anna, a character with enough warmth to elicit compassion, the dynamics to convey passion and the control to bend others to her will.

Jauhiainen did not thunder, but was nonetheless a commanding father figure, and Dyer, the lone high male voice, the noble lyric tenor, made a fine aristocrat, ushering ladies around, posturing, and singing beautifully. Lovely to hear, but maybe not the one to have on your side in a sword fight.

The most complex, and therefore the most exciting characters are those flawed nobles that Mozart so loved: Donna Elvira (soprano Korliss Uecker) and, of course, Don Giovanni (bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch).

Uecker was amazing. She commanded every one of those horribly demanding rage arias, with their jagged melodic leaps, extreme dynamics, and technical fireworks. Her voice, like her face, was sweeter than the part, a part that in the wrong throat can become shrewish. With Uecker, Donna Elvira was a sympathetic character: it was precisely Uecker's sweetness that condemned Don Giovanni when he refused the redemption she offered.

Okulitch, too, was sweet-faced enough to make his amorous conquests easy to believe, but his dissolution less so. Similarly, his voice conveyed Don Giovanni's dark but agile character while keeping to the comic side.

Mozart's tale is one of three passionate women ... and five men, only one of whom is their match — the devil himself.

Of special note in the orchestra were Mary Dibbern, whose harpsichord accompaniment for the recitative was masterful, and Chris Cerna, whose mandolin serenade charmed.