Madama Butterfly is not, in my opinion, Puccini's best effort musically, nor yet the easiest to stage interestingly. Nor is the Atlanta Opera necessarily the best company for overcoming either difficulty. Nonetheless, I was pleasantly surprised. I had seen the opera once before, but on video, which in itself is usually not a great medium for opera, and the complete lack of stage presence of Pavarotti did nothing to enhance this video. Also, at the time I was too young to pick up on the rather interesting points Puccini makes about racism, sexism, religion, and American imperialism. So here, as an adult, wearing a houmongi kimono (because I am that fabulous and thematically appropriate) with a pretty purple (but pretied, because I am that incompetent) obi, I found myself despite expectations quite enjoying the Atlanta Opera's presentation of Madama Butterfly. Dina Kuznetsova may not be the most spectacular soprano ever, but she is pretty voiced and full of appropriate pathos. Nina Yoshida, as Suzuki, provided a strong-voiced counterpart, and together, the two of them had enough stage presence to carry us through the second act, which is spent largely by the two women alone in the house. I would have liked more supernumeraries whenever possible to add visual interest to the stage, particularly instead of what the opera was doing, which was project (mostly cheesy) images on the projector backdrop. I hate hate hate projector screens in a performance. Momix is the only company I will make an exception for. Everyone else should just stop and go back to making pretty patterns on the stage with the lights. It's less cheesy. And for the love of cheese, director, don't beat us over the head with imagery with projecting giant slow moving butterflies. Unless you are planning to go full Cirque du Soleil and just shower the audience with tissue paper butterflies (which was actually kind of a fabulous end to Varekai). I'd be okay with that.
The only thing I did like about the set, which was just Butterfly's house and garden, was that the ambient light changed whenever people opened or shut the back walls (behind which was the projection screen). That was a nice touch. Costumes were good as well. The opera also set the scene by having kimono and ikebana displays out in the lobby. Well done them.
As far as watching the opera as an adult, I was really surprised at the extent and viciousness with which Puccini attacks the U.S. I was expecting more of the orientalism that was common at the time, but that's mostly background in this story in which all bad things come from America and adopting American customs and religion. There's no subtlety whatsoever. Our tenor, that cad Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, exults in his ability to buy a wife and a house forever but cancel both with a few weeks notice, and then poses awkwardly while declaiming "America, forever!"
As a side note, I am absolutely going to start assuming awkward poses and declaiming "America, forever!"
Our eponymous Butterfly starts out as a dignified old money but newly poor girl working as a geisha. She has, however, been sold to this itinerant American seaman B. F. Pinkerton, and instead of taking the approach of her peers, who pragmatically remark that foreign husbands never come back, she is head over heels in love with her foreign husband. To the point where she is abandoned by her family and friends because they see her as abandoning them by adopting the religion of her new husband. After (and with a remarkably silly projection of the bloody sun of the Japanese flag with some Japanese characters superimposed) he denounces her, Butterfly's priest type uncle and most of the other Japanese characters depart to never be seen again. This is more a projection of the way religion works in America than an accurate reflection of how religion usually works in Japan, but Puccini knows nothing of Japanese religion and just needs a plot contrivance to leave Butterfly alone playing at being an American wife. Well, one can see anger at someone ditching family in favor of condescending imperialists, so it's maybe not too unrealistic, this abandonment. Back to Butterfly's American homemaking. She makes a good go of it to, as she proceeds to be the paragon of Debi Pearl (Of {Created,Preparing} to be His Helpmeet fame) style perfect wifely submission. As in, Ms. Pearl actively advocates that young wives sit at home being bored and lonely as it will teach them to be more dependant on their husbands, and that is exactly what Butterfly does, without ever complaining. She apologizes to her new husband for bringing some of her own stuff to the marriage and never protests about how he refers to her as a toy and a butterfly, and basically infantilizes her as much as possible. Butterfly even mixes in the worship of America with the worship of the American God (which is how the god of the Christians is referred to throughout.) She has a giant (and period accurate) American flag displayed in her house, and welcomes her visitors to "an American household." She insists that she is Mrs. Pinkerton in the face of all evidence that Pinkerton himself doesn't consider himself married, and dismisses the lack of prayer-answering from her new god as this god probably doesn't realize she's in Japan, but is still better than the "fat and lazy" Japanese gods.
Butterfly's wifely submissions still don't break down even after a heartbreaking and lovely scene of her standing alone, dressed in her wedding finery in the cherry-blossomed moonlight, waiting for a love that never comes. She never questions that her son will indeed be better off in America (not sure why, since it seems being raised by Pinkerton would predispose the kid into growing up to be an ass). She also has far too much of a very American Christian sense of shame about her old profession of geisha, so now without a husband to give her money, she has no means of support. This also makes her a paragon of Pearl-style Christian womanhood.
Fortunately for my sense of justice, the opera stages her suicide as a fuck you moment against Pinkerton. As in, when he gives her some anguished singing she turns around, looks him in the eye, and stabs herself. I don't even care (much) that traditional Japanese suicide for women is throat-cutting rather than gut-stabbing. I'm just relieved the production didn't try to play it as Giselle type forgiveness for the abuser in the end. Because really. Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton should not be forgiven. Nor should a culture in which wives are expected to be submissive in the face of abuse.
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