Madam Butterfly
His Majesty's Theatre
October 2012
I first saw Andrew Sinclair’s production of Madam Butterfly
decades ago and it was the first time opera moved me deeply. It was partly the
story of a teenage Japanese girl’s sacrifice of family, faith and eventually
her son for a faithless American sailor, and it was also the exotic beauty of
the set and music.
Puccini did everything right when he set David Belasco’s
popular play about a marriage of convenience between a sailor stationed in
Nagasaki and a Japanese geisha. The romantic tragedy is perfectly paced and
decadently scored. WA Opera have been staging Butterfly roughly every six
years, most recently in 2006 although there was an unstaged Opera in the Park
performance in 2008.
Director Andrew Sinclair’s early 20th century
French interpretation of Puccini’s east-west tragedy was fresh and original
when it premiered in 1993. If you haven’t seen Madam Butterfly before this will
be a good introduction. But the Monet-inspired waterlilies, the impressionistic
Japanese costumes and the revolving wooden house (designer Kenneth Rowell) are
looking familiar and worn. A sensational cast were required to justify dusting
it off for the fourth time.
Fortunately American soprano Kelly Kaduce didn’t disappoint
as Cio-Cio-San, giving a deeply felt performance with a rounded, mellow soprano
inflected with giggles, tenderness and rage as her character required. Angus
Wood was a golden-toned Lieutenant Pinkerton, singing with youthful brashness
that a sailor’s life isn’t complete until he’s ‘picked the flowers of every
place he’s visited’ and taking the boos at curtain call good naturedly.
Cio-Cio-San’s maid Suzuki was sung by the dutifully
concerned Fiona Campbell whose face reflected in every scene the truth
Cio-Cio-San was avoiding. James Clayton was the increasingly disapproving
American Consul Sharpless and Andrew Foote was Cio-Cio-San’s ever hopeful
suitor Prince Yamadori. The kimono-clad WA Opera Chorus shuffled and bowed as
Cio-Cio-San’s wedding entourage and were fiercely condemning when they discovered
her secret conversion to Christianity.
The clash of east and west is written clearly into Puccini’s
music, with tam tams and pentatonic scales versus The Star Spangled Banner
references. In 2006 Joseph Colaneri’s conducting was one of the highlights of
the performance. Returning now as the company’s artistic director, Colaneri was
equally satisfying. The WA Symphony Orchestra were lush and cohesive, injecting
the drama required to drive the opera to its devastating conclusion.
I’ve now seen Madam Butterfly five times and my son is a
similar age to Cio-Cio-San’s blue-eyed Japanese baby so the opera has taken on
a new power. But I won’t go see it again. With only three staged operas a year
this repetition of even the most enduring opera favourite runs the risk of
overkill.
The current season of Madam Butterfly follows the revival of
the museum-piece production of Lucia di Lammermoor. Is dusty repertory opera
all that is left after the effort to create a new production like Elektra? I think
Perth deserves better.
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