Madame Butterfly @ The Dallas Opera
—Wayne Lee Gay
Two long years without opera came to an end for this opera addict Friday night, as The Dallas Opera returned to its mainstage with a sometimes glorious, always engaging performance of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. The glories and the intensity of the performance were much to the credit of conductor Emmanuel Villaume, stage director Laurie Feldman, and, in the title role, Texas-grown operatic superstar, soprano Latonia Moore.
It’s hard to believe that the work was barely 75 years old—practically modern in terms of opera history—the first time this viewer saw Madama Butterfly (Puccini’s title) in a college production in Iowa City, Iowa. Now approaching the century-and-a-quarter mark, the piece remains a staple of the operatic repertoire, with its grippingly sordid tale of male exploitation and lost female innocence, decorated with an unapologetically gorgeous and meticulously crafted score.
The world and this once-innocent viewer have both awakened to deeper issues in the past half century, however. And I, and I suspect many others, now more readily observe in the work an intriguing and disturbing sexual psychosis, eroticized racism, and a damning critique of American colonialism and western imperialism. (All of which is even more fascinating when considering that Puccini was himself a notorious womanizer and an enthusiastic admirer of America and Americans.)
So, a loud brava to stage director Feldman for giving us a production that always allows and frequently nudges us to see the serious darkness underneath the melodrama of the surface—that, indeed, permits us to notice that Butterfly, rather than an innocent teenager, is a severely damaged, delusional person from the start. A particularly telling moment arrives when Butterfly points her telescope out directly toward the audience when searching for Pinkerton’s ship in the harbor, thus implicating the audience in his crime.
Conductor Villaume pushes the drama forward with perfect control of tempo, while exploring the broad beauties of the Puccinian palette. “Un bel di” is always waiting there in Act II, and the audience broke into well-deserved applause for the notoriously famous aria. But Villaume found the climax of the work in the brutal drumbeat when Butterfly, realizing the truth, loses her innocence and becomes a determined suicide.
In the title role of Cio-Cio San (“Butterfly”), Moore combines flawless technique and solid musicality with her intensely warm native tone quality; the sheer beauty of her voice serves as a foundation on which she builds her captivatingly textured reading of the role.
Tenor Evan LeRoy Johnson provides a calmly callous counterpart as Pinkerton, though his generally solid vocal control slips into a brassy quality in the upper registers. The supporting roles are uniformly outstanding musically and dramatically: mezzo-soprano Kirstin Chávez brings warmth and empathy to the role of Butterfly’s faithful servant Suzuki, while tenor Martin Bakari provides an energetically sleazy rendition of Goro the marriage broker. Korean-born tenor Hyung Yun plays up the comic aspects of Yamadori as a Japanese prince with westernized attire, and bass Adam Lau gives a muscular rendition of the formidable Bonze.
Baritone Michael Adams as Sharpless likewise provides an appropriately multi-layered aura of ambiguity to the role of the American consul. He and Johnson, as the only male American characters in the opera, provide a purposely careless swagger in contrast to the rigid formality of most of the Japanese characters.
The role of Kate Pinkerton (sung by Dallas-based soprano Gabrielle Gilliam) becomes strikingly significant in this staging. In her one scene, she wears an eye-catching white dress that draws audience attention as her face shows shock and contained rage toward her husband; she examines the artifacts of Butterfly’s love for Pinkerton, and, spotting the sword with which Butterfly will shortly commit suicide, she touches it and recoils. Butterfly enters, also wearing white, thus putting Pinkerton’s two wives in direct visual competition. After coming face-to-face with Butterfly, Kate snaps her parasol open as she exits, in a striking echo of the same mannerism by Butterfly’s entourage of maidens in the opening scene.
Lighting designer Duane Schuler creates a nearly miraculous bleeding effect at the end, soaking Butterfly’s white robe in deepening red before drowning the whole stage in a dark, bloody crimson, forcing the audience to participate in Butterfly’s demise. Michael Yeargan’s sets, created for TDO in 2000, have not aged particularly well: too many tall straight lines and too much symmetry undermine the intimacy and romantic, exotically decadent aura of the story. Yet even against this square-ish backdrop, soprano Moore stands out with a version of Butterfly this audience member will not soon forget.
WHEN: Through February 26
WHERE: Winspear Opera House at the AT&T Performing Arts Center
WEB: For tickets, visit https://dallasopera.org/tickets/ or call 214-443-1000
