"I don't like singing and I hate opera," announces Walter, a wiry zealot of an avant-garde theater director, to the astonished members of the opera company he is about to direct in Don Giovanni. Walter, who abhors theater that "doesn't understand silence," intends to rescue Mozart's opera from its Lorenzo da Ponte libretto, beginning with the first scene, in which the Don is now killed by Donna Anna's father, rather than vice versa. Suzanne Osten's witty and often riotous comedy about an opera company at war with its director takes as its namesake the Marx Brothers but, as Village Voice critic Leighton Kerner writes, this is no Night at the Opera: "The Mozart Brothers doesn't demolish Mozart's Don Giovanni as the Marx gang so memorably trashed Verdi's Il trovatore. Rather, it treats Mozart's work as an elusive, enigmatic monster to be tracked down and in some way understood.... The Mozart Brothers is obsessed with the idea of opera as theater, obsessed to a degree that invites comparison to the Ingmar Bergman and Fellini of decades past...." As Walter, co-scriptwriter Etienne Glaser plays lunacy with the kind of conviction that defies disbelief, and the result is a marvelous turn in which his iconoclastic passion is wholly admirable-and receives a kiss of approval from the Master's ghost himself.