Review: ‘Madama Butterfly’ at Lyric Opera is a bold, new take on Puccini’s beloved opera

Giacomo Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” one of the most popular and frequently performed operas in the world, is a searing story of the exploitation of a teenage geisha set against a backdrop of imperialist ignorance and hubris.

But sometimes forgotten or overlooked is that the 1904 opera itself is a kind of exploitation as well — white, European creators and interpreters offering their perhaps well-meaning yet frequently ill-informed re-creation of Japanese culture both in the music and story.

“Just as Butterfly is trapped with little agency in this opera, we as Asian Americans have been trapped by many of the traditional depictions of Butterfly’s story,” writes stage director Matthew Ozawa in his program note.

He and an entirely Japanese and Japanese American artistic team have conceived a bold, new take on “Madama Butterfly” that was first seen at the Cincinnati Opera in 2023 and is being presented for the first time at Lyric Opera of Chicago in a nine-performance run ending April 12.

But as commendable as the intent and imagination behind this version are, the intrinsic emotional power of this beloved opera is significantly lost amid the production’s complex, conceptual structure and invented narrative overlay.

In this version, the opera opens in a present-day apartment where B.F. Pinkerton dons a virtual reality headset and enters a game that sets the whole story in motion with him in the role of his avatar — a Navy lieutenant at the beginning of the 20th century arriving in Nagasaki aboard his warship, the Abraham Lincoln.

There is a frequent, often jarring and no doubt intentional collision between past and present, between Pinkerton’s contemporary world and his virtual reality imaginings, with him sometimes hovering bizarrely and distractingly on the sidelines when he is not directly involved in the action in his avatar role.

The apartment splits in half and slides to the left and right of the stage, and the virtual reality world — which both draws on Japanese tradition (including an enlarged version of a Hokusai depiction of Mt. Fuji as an interior backdrop) and defies it — slides into place in the middle. But with the side sections taking up at least a third of the stage, the action is oddly compressed and sometimes crowded in this central area — a major downside to the design by Kimie Nishikawa and the dots collective.

Garish, sometimes flashing lights and costumes (designer Maiko Matsushima) with their oddly cartoonish looks and dashes of lime green inspired by contemporary Japanese pop culture are meant to play up the artificiality of the world of Puccini and his collaborators. But by doing so, this approach doesn’t allow viewers to invest in the emotions of the traditional story and turns the production into a kind of intellectual exercise in repatriation.

Conductor Domingo Hindoyan, music director designate of the Los Angeles Opera, has the tough task of trying to achieve cohesion among the production’s disparate, competing elements, and for the most part, he succeeds. But throughout this production, there is a constant uncomfortable tension between Puccini’s music, which wants to go in one direction, and the staging, which clearly wants to go in another.

Nowhere is this break more evident than at the end. Instead of committing suicide in her home after her child has been taken from her, Butterfly (Cio-Cio San) flees the set. She runs to the front of the stage to complete the act, making her death a bid to escape the repressive confines of the entire opera — perhaps the most inspired dramatic moment in this production. But this move inevitably ruins the final emotional effect of Puccini’s opera, and perhaps that is the point.

But if so, it is easy to wonder if it wouldn’t have made more sense to create an entirely new opera that would take “Madama Butterfly” as a starting point for the cultural, ethnic and historical explorations Ozawa desires.

Almost lost or at least overshadowed amid the dramatic reworking of this opera are the two fine, well-matched singers in the principal roles, starting with Korean soprano Karah Son, who is making her Lyric debut as Butterfly.

She has sung this role many times and her comfort with it is evident as she persuasively conveys both the youthfulness and maturity of Butterfly. Her penetrating, forceful voice rings out easily when she first enters from the far rear of the stage in the bridal procession.

Making his Lyric debut as well, the tall, strapping American tenor, Evan LeRoy Johnson, certainly looks the part of Navy Lt. Pinkerton. He has a natural, compelling feel for Puccini’s musical lines, soaring securely to the role’s top notes.

The rest of the cast is solid, including Japanese mezzo-soprano Nozomi Kato, as Suzuki, Butterfly’s loyal servant, and baritone Zachary Nelson as Sharpless, the American consul who arranges the marriage and has prescient misgivings about all that is to follow.