Madama Butterfly, Metropolitan Opera HD Encore, June 15 2011

I was delighted to learn that the Met would rebroadcast this beautiful production by Anthony Minghella. There is no little house on a hill overlooking Nagasaki; rather, shoji screens that slide back and forth, right to left, are sufficient to evoke the little house. In back, the stage is raked, but painted in strips of successively darker colors which suggest steps. Above the steps, there is open sky. But the production may be most notable for its use of the traditional Japanese technique of using people, clad all in black, with black veils, to assist in the performance. By convention, these black-clad figures are understood not to be present—in a similar fashion to the convention that an “aside” sung by one character on stage is not heard by the other characters, even if they are only 10 feet away. In particular, the production sidesteps the challenges of working with a very young child by using a puppet dressed in a sailor costume and handled by three people: one for the feet, one for a hand and the body, and one for a hand and the head. It doesn’t work for some people, but it does for me. The puppeteers were masters of their craft. Additionally, Butterfly’s additional servants (Suzuki is one of three) were small puppets, manipulated by other black-clad assistants. In the flower scene, when Butterfly and Suzuki need flowers to decorate the little house in preparation for Pinkerton’s arrival, the flowers arrive on the backs of more black-clad assistants, who prostrate themselves on stage, and the principals can then pick up the flowers.

The most beautiful scenic effects accompany the beautiful love duet of the end of Act 1. The stage is darkened (after all, night has fallen), and 10-12 spherical paper lanterns are carried about by the black-clad assistants, now almost perfectly invisible in the darkness. Later a curtain of strings , each string bearing a number of golden paper squares, is lowered, and Butterfly and Pinkerton drift among them, while a flight of origami birds at the end of bamboo poles adds a special touch. Truly beautiful.

Our cast:
Butterfly: Patricia Racette
Pinkerton: Marcello Giordani
Sharpless: Dwayne Croft
Suzuki: Maria Zifchak
Conductor: Patrick Summers
Production: Anthony Minghella

Patricia Racette’s Butterfly was excellent, though she didn’t quite carry the impact that I experienced in her San Francisco performance of 2007, which is one of my “top ten.” The other principals brought their considerable talents to the performance as well. An alpha-minus.