San Francisco Opera’s new production of Madama Butterfly is lovely to look at, but it’s hard to get excited over the remaining aspects. The set consists of the little house on Nagasaki hill with sliding shoji walls and pointed arches, and rafters open to the elements. To one side there is a deck; growing through the deck is a large tree, with leaves larger than fig-tree leaves, leaning over the little house as though it is trying to engulf it, kudzu-like. The little house really does sit on top of a hill, so that the characters need to climb up 6 feet or so to reach the house. In the background there is a diorama of Nagasaki harbor way down below; the little house may be 1000 feet or more above sea level.
The little house and its hill were mounted on a turntable. The unfortunate aspect of the production was that (1) the turntable was overused, there seemed to be too many gratuitous rotations of the turntable (2) the rotation of the turntable was presented as being performed by half a dozen kuroku (black-clad stagehands) pulling on hefty ropes, but the ropes often went slack and the illusion of pulling a weighty object was not well conveyed. Other kuroku served the performance as well, but instead of the appropriate stealthy, I’m-not-really-here motions, their grossly exaggerated stepping motions seemed to want to call attention to them.
Our cast differed from the opening night cast:
Cio-Cio-San: Daniela Dessì
Lt. B. F. Pinkerton: Stefano Secco
Suzuki: Daveda Karanas
Goro: Thomas Glenn
Sharpless: Quinn Kelsey
Prince Yamadori: Austin Kness
The Bonze: Christian Van Horn
Conductor: Julian Kovatchev
The conductor for the first several performances was our esteemed Verdi/Puccini maestro, Nicola Luisotti; I’m sure I would have preferred to have been at one of his performances. I can’t specifically fault anyone for anything, aside from the director who dressed Goro in a straw hat and a checkered vest (maybe he specializes in procuring Japanese women for visiting American sailors?), but the performance fell far short of the bar established a few years ago in the productions with Patricia Racette. I do need to note a few effective directorial touches: we see Suzuki at the opening of Act II praying to her Japanese gods, then we notice that Cio-Cio San has been praying to a statue of the Virgin Mary. Also, when Pinkerton enters the house, he removes his shoes, Japanese fashion—when Sharpless enters the “Welcome to this American house,” he does not. A beta—but barely.
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