San Antonio Opera
In reconceived 'Madama Butterfly,' lots of ideas, many of
them on the mark
September 12, 2009San Antonio Opera’s enterprising new production of “Madama Butterfly” is so brilliantly executed and so freighted with good ideas that one could almost overlook its conceptual wrong-headedness.
Despite severe misgivings about the concept, the venue (Municipal Auditorium) and the amplification the venue necessitated, the production counts as a must-see on several grounds.
Conductor Enrique Patron de Rueda realized Giacomo Puccini’s score with shapeliness, astute rhythms and a fine sense of the dramatic moment. The principals on stage were excellent singers -- to the extent one can fairly judge through the microphones -- and quite good actors. That much is more or less what one expects from San Antonio Opera.
The real news -- much good, some bad -- was in the stage direction and production concept of John DeLancie, with strong assists by lighting designer Kenneth Yunker and technical director Max Parrilla.
DeLancie chose to transplant the action from the hills overlooking Nagasaki Harbor in the early 20th century to the fictional “city of Omara, sometime in the future,” as we are informed by a supertitle. According to San Antonio Opera artistic director Mark Richter, DeLancie wanted an abstract set, not the too-familiar arrangement of romantic footbridge and charming little house with sliding rice-paper walls. The team decided to repurpose and modify a set that had originally been built for a Utah Opera production of “The Magic Flute.”
The set -- a circle of rock shelves and terraces that could have served equally well for “Die Walküre” -- suggested a mythic space. DeLancie extended that notion with several directorial, um, ideas. He added a trio of dancers portraying monkeys, for no clear reason. He gave several of the principals the power to summon dramatic effects with hand gestures, as if they were gods or demons. Cio-Cio San, or Madame Butterfly, made her Act I entrance by rising from a rock terrace through a trap, like a divinity.
No. No. No. Cio-Cio San is not any kind of divinity. She is an orphaned, impoverished 15-year-old urchin who’s been eking out a living by singing for strangers (not, as a supertitle insisted, by being a “courtesan”) and who desperately pins her hopes on Pinkerton, the callow US Navy lieutenant who “marries” her on a month-to-month lease and then abandons her, pregnant with his son, to return to the States and find a “real” American wife. This is not mythic material. It’s sordid and entirely earthbound melodrama. In his mythic tropes and his choice of over-the-top fantasy costumes for the women’s chorus and some secondary characters, DeLancie leads in the wrong direction, a direction that is false both to the libretto (from a play by David Belasco) and to Puccini’s music.
If the big idea was far off the mark, many of DeLancie’s smaller ideas were the stuff of genius. The orchestral prelude to the second part of Act II became a touching dream sequence in which Cio-Cio San imagines a happy family life with Pinkerton and the young son she bore him. Her suicide is not portrayed literally, but is suggested with an astonishing sequence of lighting effects and projections -- one of several visual coups de theatre that were dramatically accurate and that demanded (and got) split-second timing. (Technically, this was one of the most impressive opera productions I’ve seen anywhere.) In the mundane aspects of staging -- blocking, crowd control, intimate details -- DeLancie was generally sure-footed.
DeLancie’s résumé is long on acting credits (including the recurring character of Q on “StarTrek: The Next Generation”) and short on directing. To judge from this production, he is insufficiently disciplined as a director, but hugely talented.
Rather than equip the singers with body mics -- which have problems of their own -- microphones were placed along the lip of the stage. Dynamics and balances among singers, and between singers and the excellent pit orchestra, were thus highly dependent on how far DeLancie put them from the microphones at any given moment. The results were acceptably natural-sounding when singers were positioned near center-stage, but too loud and electric when they were downstage and sometimes thin when they were upstage.
Many fine qualities came through, nonetheless. Soprano Jee Hyun Lim essayed the title role with accurate aim and gleaming highs, though with a somewhat hard edge that might have been attributable to the amplification. In the tougher second act, she fully conveyed her character’s desperation. “Un bel di” was very convincingly acted.
Tenor Fernando de la Mora’s Pinkerton was agile, stylish and youthful, perhaps a trifle stressed on top, but generally beautiful. It would have been nice to hear his aria of remorse, “Addio fiorito asil,” a little farther from the microphones.
Mezzo-soprano Mika Shigamatsu, as Cio-Cio San’s faithful servant Suzuki, sang with winning warmth and, even positioned in an upstage corner for the prayer that opens Act II, ample power. I liked the interpretive grit she brought to the role. Baritone Luis Ledesma’s dark, rich, honeyed timbre was ideally suited to the role of Sharpless, the American consul. Tenor Jeffrey Halili’s manic, insidious Goro, the “marriage” broker, was wonderfully effective.
Mike
Greenberg
