Taking flight with “Madame Butterfly”

Retooling the past

“Madame Butterfly” – a review

by Bondo Wyszpolski

This is a heartbreaking melodrama during which the audience is likely to cry and shed tears, and you may do so as well without embarrassment. That’s because we lose ourselves in the sensuality of the story and not in its ingredients, the historical accuracy of its depictions. In a few moments you’ll understand why I’m bringing this up.

LA Opera’s latest presentation of “Madame Butterfly” comes by way of Mario Gas and Madrid’s Teatro Real, with a gorgeous Art Deco-inspired set designed by the late Ezio Frigerio. Visually, it may be the most stunning of all the “Butterflies” that I’ve seen and can recall.

But let’s recap the story. An American naval officer, Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton (Jonathan Tetelman) is stationed in Nagasaki sometime after the turn of the century — composer Giacomo Puccini’s opera premiered in 1904 — and through the marriage broker Goro (Rodell Aure Rosel) he secures a house overlooking the harbor and a young wife, Cio-Cio San (Karah Son), the butterfly of the title, to go with it. There is an American consul, Sharpless (Michael Sumuel), who tries to warn Pinkerton that this is no trifling matter, and that the girl he’s taking for a temporary wife may actually love him.

The first act brings all this to fruition, or consummation if you wish, and then Pinkerton leaves. He’s gone for three years. Cio-Cio-San and her maid, Suzuki (Hyona Kim), live frugally but eventually their funds run dangerously low. Pinkerton’s young bride anxiously awaits his promised return, and indeed he does come back — albeit with “a real wife,” an American named Kate (Gabrielle Turgeon). As one can imagine, Cio-Cio-San, who has in the interim borne Pinkerton a son, is crushed. In most operas someone dies tragically in the final scene, and “Madame Butterfly” is no exception.

Puccini was an Italian composer, and presumably neither he nor his audience knew a lot about Asia, although Orientalism had had its fling in Western Europe, much of it no doubt filtered through the prints of Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro and others that often depicted the pleasure quarters where elaborately adorned geishas entertained and amused their male clientele. Perhaps this is why Puccini has Cio-Cio-San reveal that she and her family were geishas.

Now, Cio-Cio-San is 15 years old when Pinkerton marries her, and since it takes several years of training to become a geisha it would have been more likely that she was a maiko, or geisha-in-training. Either way, and despite her youth, she would have known or suspected that men are not the most reliable creatures on this planet. And, by age 18, she would have been less naive.

We don’t know too much about Pinkerton. Why was he in Nagasaki? How long had he been in Japan? Why did he take a lease on a house for 99 years? Why did he marry a young girl instead of just having an affair or taking up with a prostitute? And why marry in the first place if he knew he was about to leave? Furthermore, why return later with his American wife and seemingly with the purpose of taking his young son back to the States to be raised by him and Kate? Why would Kate consent to this idea? Wouldn’t she rather have children of her own? And, once in America, wouldn’t Cio-Cio-San’s child be subject to racial discrimination?

Those are some of the inquiries we’re not supposed to make, and it’s enough for us to see that Pinkerton’s oblivious, callous, arrogant, and downright dense — so much so, in fact, that we might wonder if there’s a satiric jab here at “the ugly American” and American Imperialism.

But I’m not so sure we can easily let Cio-Cio-San off the hook. She’s willful, stubborn and headstrong, trusting blindly that Pinkerton hasn’t forgotten her and will return as he has promised. A young woman’s trust and hope, and that’s why it’s heartbreakingly sad to see Butterfly’s wings torn asunder.

Basically, it’s unrequited love. Cio-Cio-San sacrifices everything for Pinkerton, even her religion and her relatives, and she won’t consider or accept a lifeline out of this situation, even when Goro tries to marry her off to a rich suitor, Prince Yamadori (Hyungjin Son), and even Sharpless — who does a lot of handwringing — tries to warn her that the playing field has changed.

The lush music, conducted so gracefully by James Conlong, pulls us along, and there is some fine singing from everyone involved, including Cio-Cio-San’s “Un bel dì”, in which she pours out all her faith in a joyful reunion. As I’ve said, we are meant to lose ourselves in this story, and most people do. Why see it otherwise? And we know going in that it’s one of the saddest operas ever written, liberties taken at every turn, and we surrender to that. It’s not a documentary, it’s a fictional romance designed to put a big lump in our throat.

The performances are uniformly good, although it’s the two leads, Jonathan Tetelman and Karah Son, who stand out. The hisses and boos thrown at Tetelman during the curtain call are of course done in jest; he is, after all, the villain of the piece. Karah Son, on the other hand, deserves all the accolades she’s accrued. She’s performed the role hundreds of times and I imagine she’s endeared herself to thousands of hearts.

At the end of the opera, after Cio-Cio-San has waited up nearly all night, Pinkerton finally arrives, realizes the harm he’s caused, but is too cowardly to face Cio-Cio-San and so he essentially runs away.

And here it should be noted that LA Opera has also been rather cowardly, unable to present a standard piece from the operatic repertoire without quivering in its shoes about coming across as politically incorrect. Oh no, we can’t be accused of that!

Again, “Madame Butterfly” is a product of its time and it’s also a work for the stage, designed to engage and entertain. But because this is a new era, and the company — simply by presenting the work without some sort of “footnote” — could be accused of having a racist, non-woke and culturally insensitive opera in its current season, it’s taken on a production that is now set on a 1930s-era Hollywood soundstage.

To deflect any potential accusation of furthering along outmoded stereotypes, we (the audience) are now watching the filming of a period piece as it might have taken place (minus the interracial couple) 90 years ago, with camera crews and other technicians hovering around both sides of the turntable set. To emphasize this situation, the film (or video transmission) that is actually being shot is projected above the supertitles on the proscenium. Admittedly, it’s a clever way out, although in another sense it’s somewhat distracting. And, ultimately, what’s the point? In other words, we can see through the gimmick, the attempt not to offend certain members of its audience and, yes, to be all-inclusive.

Well, what’s going on here?

All we need to do is look at the program.

For some reason that can only be deemed a capitulation, the program contains an essay entitled “Reorienting ‘Madame Butterfly’ From the ‘White Gaze’ to Inclusive Opera,” and it’s by Ashlyn Aiko Nelson who has a Ph.D., apparently in economics, but at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University-Bloomington she founded the O’Neill Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

You can already sense trouble brewing. Do you want to be lectured at by an economist before enjoying a fanciful work of art?

About 20 years ago, Ms. Aiko Nelson saw a production of “Madame Butterfly” and experienced “cognitive dissonance,” wording which makes it seem she imbibed too much wine during intermission. At any rate, she then lays the groundwork for her assault by pointing out the obvious, that “the opera is a Western fantasy of Asian exoticism, composed for white audiences.”

Therefore, in her eyes, Cio-Cio-San is a caricature, a degrading portrayal (the submissive Asian female, of course), and this has led her on a crusade to clean up this and other such operas (a Tipper Gore for the modern age), although she does stop just short of calling for “Madame Butterfly” to be shelved: “Eliminating the work from the canon entirely is impractical for opera companies today that rely on the stable ticket revenues that canonical productions generate, and also would reduce the representation of Asian singers in opera casts — at least until the canon includes operas with a greater diversity of roles and companies hire more equitably.”

In other words, if “Madame Butterfly” wasn’t a money-maker and also didn’t include roles for Asian performers it should end up on the chopping block.

Aiko Nelson finally gets off her soapbox with this departing salvo: “Fortunately, many opera companies today… have made important shifts in their approaches to presenting ‘Madame Butterfly.’ Working in close collaboration with the Asian Opera Alliance throughout its preparation for this production, LA Opera has critically examined how to preserve the beauty of the opera while eliminating its harmful stereotypes and tropes, demonstrating how canonical operas can adapt to become more diverse, equitable and inclusive.”

Ironically, several roles in “Madame Butterfly” which could have gone to Asian singers, such as that of the Imperial Commissioner and the Official Registrar, have gone to white performers who stick out like a sore thumb.

Staged opera or theater is both visual and auditory and has its own rules, and they do not need to be overseen by a self-appointed arbiter of good taste or political correctness. Sometimes it’s wonderful to deliberately fly in the face of political correctness.

If we pander to an ideology removed from the spirit of the work we’re in danger. Can you imagine the promoters of an August Wilson play demanding that they give half the roles to non-black actors so that the work will be “more diverse, equitable and inclusive”?

Over 75% of opera audiences are white, and without their support the major opera venues would not be able to produce any operas, let alone “Madame Butterfly,” and then everyone would be out of a job or else singing in community productions. Be careful who you kowtow to. The Mark Taper Forum got elbowed into producing a season of works by or featuring black performers and its core audience, its subscribers, balked at the move and so the theater lost revenue and went dark, and still hasn’t recovered from that ill-conceived move.

It’s always a balancing act, but I don’t want outsiders shoving their politics or sociology into places where it doesn’t belong. Their personal agendas reek of censorship. We know what “Madame Butterfly” is, a gem from another era, with all its faults and virtues. Now go and enjoy it for what it is, beautiful music, wonderful singing, and a knock-out of a set.

Madame Butterfly is onstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave, downtown Los Angeles at the Music Center. Performances, tonight (Thursday) at 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, Sept. 29 at 2 p.m.; Saturday, Oct. 5 at 7:30 p.m.; Wednesday, Oct. 9 at 7:30 p.m.; and Sunday, Oct. 13 at 2 p.m. Tickets begin at $37.50 and go up substantially ($400 for good orchestra seats). Available at the box office, by calling (213) 972-8001, or online at LAOpera.org. ER