‘Madama Butterfly’ Review: Coming Out of Its Chrysalis

Boston Lyric Opera’s production, the result of a yearslong effort to reconsider Puccini’s classic in the wake of anti-Asian violence, is thoughtful but low on passion; in New York, recitals by Julia Bullock and Lise Davidsen included obscure songs and classic repertoire alike.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Sept. 19, 2023 at 5:46 pm ET

Karen Chia-Ling Ho, center 

PHOTO: KEN YOTSUKURA

Boston

The stereotypes inherent in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly”—a story built around the white imperialist male fantasy of the submissive Asian woman—have become increasingly problematic in recent years, leading several opera companies to invite all-Asian creative teams to rethink this canonic work. Following the spate of anti-Asian violence in 2021, Boston Lyric Opera convened a series of conversations, “The Butterfly Process,” to examine the piece and its ambivalent legacy; a new production of the opera, unveiled last week at the Emerson Colonial Theatre, is one result.

Directed by choreographer and activist Phil Chan, this “Butterfly” is set in the U.S. during World War II. Cio-Cio-San works as a singer in an underground nightclub in San Francisco’s Chinatown; her “wedding” to Pinkerton, a naval officer, is part of a nightly stunt at the club. Between Acts I and II, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, Pinkerton goes off to war, and the pregnant Butterfly is sent to an incarceration camp (as BLO refers to it) in Arizona, sharing the fate of thousands of Japanese-Americans during that time.

This thoughtful effort, aided by some changes in the text, makes certain aspects of the story more palatable for contemporary audiences. Butterfly is an adult woman with agency, not a helpless 15-year-old being sold to the highest bidder. The lines questioning her about her age are directed to Pinkerton, who says he is 21. In the love duet at the end of Act 1, Butterfly puts on a coat rather than sheds her clothes. In the camp, she longs for Pinkerton’s return not out of hopeless love but because their son is dying of tuberculosis and she has no resources to care for him. There’s no suicide; the opera is framed as the recollections of the adult Butterfly in 1983 looking back on this traumatic period of her life.

The sets by Yu Shibagaki, costumes by Sara Ryung Clement, and lighting by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew ably evoke the nightclub (Butterfly’s wedding attendants are leggy showgirls) and the camp with its makeshift wooden barracks and watchtower. Some of the photographs that depict Butterfly’s history are family pictures belonging to BLO’s artistic adviser and dramaturg Nina Yoshida Nelsen; three historical dramaturgs are also credited.

But making Butterfly’s relationship with Pinkerton more transactional than romantic coexists awkwardly with Puccini’s swoony music. The opera is tightly constructed as a weepie, and if Butterfly’s heart isn’t broken by love, the tragedy doesn’t really land.

Karen Chia-Ling Ho and Dominick Chenes

 PHOTO: KEN YOTSUKURA

As Butterfly, Karen Chia-Ling Ho carefully walked the line between knowingness and feeling, but there was little sense of passionate abandon and her “Un bel di” was sturdy rather than soaring. One of the best moments in the evening was the “Flower Duet,” in which Butterfly and Suzuki (the imposing Alice Chung) decorated the camp with handmade paper flowers in anticipation of Pinkerton’s arrival; the relationship between the two women felt the most real in the opera. The men were properly unappealing: As Pinkerton, Dominick Chenes’s tenor seemed muted; Troy Cook was an efficient Sharpless, more a tool than a sympathizer with Butterfly, as is usual; Rodell Rosel was a sleazy Goro (here the owner of the nightclub). Dancer Cassie Wang, depicting Butterfly between Acts 2 and 3, performed some ambiguous choreography by Michael Sakamoto. The theater has no pit, so the orchestra, led by David Angus, seemed unusually loud and brassy.

***

New York

Julia Bullock’s recital in the Park Avenue Armory’s Board of Officers Room on Sept. 11 was typically unconventional—she is far more likely to headline a piece like Michel van der Aa’s multidisciplinary opera “Upload” than to sing “La Traviata.” Here, she made a strong case for widening the definition of the art song to include the work of Nina Simone along with Franz Schubert and Hugo Wolf. Every song and interpretive choice in the program was intentional, focused on building that larger structure. Ms. Bullock, who supplies her own translations of lyrics, is never just focused on making pretty sounds. Rather, her distinctive, velvety lower register, her crystalline text articulation, and her commitment to her material make her a magnetic performer.

That command held sway as she constructed musical arcs. Two quiet, folk-tinged songs by the obscure singer-songwriter Connie Converse segued seamlessly into a Kurt Weill group: his mournful “Lost in the Stars” followed by a sparky, rhythmically free spoken-and-sung version of “Denn wie man sich bettet,” and then an intense “Wie lange noch?” full of suppressed fury. In John Cage’s “She is Asleep,” no. 2, her wordless vocalise paired with John Arida’s damped piano made a sleeper’s inner world feel vital. In a selection of songs written by black Americans, some of them women, ably arranged by Jeremy Siskind, her complex portrayals persuasively rejected the narrative of the helpless female so prevalent in traditional art songs. Her stylings of Cora “Lovie” Austin and Alberta Hunter’s “Downhearted Blues,” which turned the betrayed woman’s lament on its head, and Nina Simone’s “Four Women,” a chilling depiction of stereotypes of black women, created characters as powerful as any written by Schubert.

***

Lise Davidsen got a bigger stage for her Sept. 14 recital—the Metropolitan Opera House. The young Norwegian soprano has made a splash at the Met, starting with her 2019 debut as Lisa in Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades” and followed by a trio of Strauss roles: Ariadne, Chrysothemis, and the Marschallin. Her spectacular instrument recalls Birgit Nilsson’s—producing a blazing, metallic sound with effortless power and total control, one seemingly able to carry out the back of the auditorium and across Central Park.

Recitals are a different beast from opera, however. While Ms. Davidsen’s voice still sounded glorious and house-filling, the Grieg and Sibelius songs on the first half of the program were pretty but generic. On the second half, a quartet of Schubert hits came off better, with Ms. Davidsen capturing the dramatic pacing and scene-painting of “Gretchen am Spinnrade” and “Erlkönig” and the serenity of “An die Musik” and “Litanei auf das Fest Aller Seelen”—in the last, she sang softly and still filled the space. The expansive operatic potential of a Strauss group also worked to her advantage, though “Befreit” could have been more intimate. James Baillieu was the sensitive pianist.

Opera arias were also sprinkled throughout. Ms. Davidsen will sing Leonora in Verdi’s “La forza del destino” at the Met next February, but her selections from “Un ballo in maschera” and “Otello” felt undercooked. She shone, however, in Lisa’s final aria from “Queen of Spades,” and in Wagner’s grand salute “Dich, teure Halle” from “Tannhauser,” summoning the spirit of Nilsson once again.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).