Review: LA Opera’s ‘Madame Butterfly’ Absorbingly Seizes the Heart of Daring Cinema

LA Opera’s 2024-25 season is off to a stellar start with Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly — a dramatically searing epic where two worlds and artistic mediums meet, characterized by (unrequited) love, misguided hope, and cruel insensitivity. With living-legend conductor James Conlon again leading the musical stylings with his unique penmanship, and director Mario Gas ingeniously reimagining this Butterfly for new audiences, there is much to exult in despite the crushing premise originally written by John Luther Long, and subsequently adapted by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, more than 120 years ago.

The three act Madame Butterfly, for those familiar, illuminates love’s misgivings and monomania, particularly in the context of an almost dehumanizing imperialism, where one unassuming party is cold-heartedly taken advantage of by another. Usually this all transpires in Nagasaki, Japan but, in this revival, the three hours of developments and ebbs and flows of song takes place on a 1930s Hollywood soundstage.

With Ezio Frigerio’s cannily constructed movie set, surrounded by lighting fixtures as well as a live camera crew (the cinematographic output of which can be seen overhead in moving black and white with supertitles), and shaded with a polychromatic mysticism by revival lighting designer Pablo Santiago, the setting shift is a significant twist indeed, though the crux remains the same: Stationed overseas in the early 1900s, an opportunistic American naval officer, B.F. Pinkerton, hankers a young Japanese bride in the interim before he plans to exercise the “option to cancel” and return to the states where he will marry an American wife. An avaricious marriage broker named Goro transacts Pinkerton’s marriage to the 15-year-old Cio-Cio-San (meaning “Butterfly”) whose only worthwhile material attachment is a dagger used by her father to suicide himself.

Closely involved in this unique arrangement are Cio-Cio-San’s servant, Suzuki, and an American consul named Sharpless. The latter perspicaciously notes that Butterfly, a former geisha, who has gone so far as to turn away from her indigenous faith to adopt Pinkerton’s religion of Christianity and U.S. nationalism (suggested through the leitmotif of “The Star-Spangled Banner”), might truly be in love with a husband she’s barely known. When the white-coated spouse predictably abandons his foreign bride, a surprise reveal and an anticipatory revisit by Pinkerton, materialized years later, asks of Butterfly the unthinkable. This culminates a story about an investment between two people so misaligned that it borders on delusion or, more appropriately, is a clear example of neglectful abuse.

Korean soprano superstar Karah Son inhabits Cio-Cio-San once again, this time being her first go-around with the LA Opera. Dressed for much of the production in one of Butterfly’s regally beautiful kimonos (the varied costumes are designed by Academy Award-winner Franca Squarciapino), Son grippingly captures Cio-Cio-San’s innocence, zeal, expectancy, and grief, each shift in sentiment worn purposefully on her eyes and on the vocal chords with which she resolutely marks her humanity. The famous Act II aria, “Un bel dì vedremo,” sees Son lain vulnerable, her persona’s contentment wholly dependent on seeing Pinkerton again, a harbinger of a happy ending that ultimately eludes the audience.

Also making his LA Opera debut is Chilean tenor Jonathan Tetelman who, having previously played Pinkerton, knows and conveys his motivations at a micro level. Pinkerton is certainly someone who, not dissimilar from practices employed by superpower nations, practically hegemonizes Cio-Cio-San who cannot escape the exotic pull of her military beau long after his desertion.

Pinkerton’s influence is captivatingly underscored by Tetelman in relation to Son’s Butterfly in the ostensibly amorous back-and-forth toward the end of Act I where inconvenient truths simmer underneath. The seeds of these verities are planted earlier in “Dovunque al mondo” — a chauvinist declaration wrung out of such hair-raising aplomb by Tetelman that, as observers, we’re immediately wary of him. Notwithstanding that, through the South American star’s portrayal of Pinkerton, we realize that even the carefree and careless, especially those who ungainly navigate through the terrain of others’ feelings, can feel culpable for decisions yielding dreadful results, as expressed through the aria “Addio, fiorito asil,” which Tetelman vocalizes with such convincing clarity that we’re inclined to almost forgive his character.

Korean mezzo-soprano Hyona Kim is impeccably cast as Butterfly’s ardent attendant, Suzuki. Despite Butterfly sometimes physically taking out her frustrations on the demure Suzuki, the two are as simpatico as sisters, which warmly comes through in the Act II “Flower” duet, “Scuoti quella fronda di ciliegio,” when the buoyant anticipation of a reconciliation is still palpable. Without the slightest hint of a lag, Kim more than holds her own vis-à-vis Son’s Cio-Cio-San, all the way up to crying tears for her master whose downtrodden hopelessness reaches the point of no return in the heartbreaking and reality-crashing “Come una mosca.”

Bass-baritone and Texas native Michael Sumuel imbues Sharpless with a humble and empathetic stateliness, acting in the better interests of Butterfly. This is exemplified via a sweet-sounding interchange between Sumuel’s Sharpless and Son’s Cio-Cio-San in the middle of Act II when an improbable alliance is struck in large part because Sharpless is motivated by scruples that Pinkerton willingly condones.

And, to the degree Sumuel authenticates his part, the same can be said of the Grammy-nominated Filipino tenor Rodell Aure Rosel who succeeds in presenting his Goro as an amoral figure motivated by financial returns above all else as in the opera’s first number, “E soffitto e pareti’.” Auxiliary performers include Wei Wu, Hyungjin Son, Gabrielle Turgeon, and elementary school-aged Enzo Ma who, despite their limited stage time, positively impact the opera as the irate traditionalist Bonze, gluttonous suitor Yamadori, the “innocent” Kate Pinkerton, and a child whose origins come into plain view in Act II.

Beyond the principal players, the chorus’ lush voices, directed in unison towards a common goal by the gifted Jeremy Frank, make this Madame Butterfly feel substantial in both scope and tone, with a weight that demands serious and contemplative consideration from its attending crowds. As such, Madame Butterfly, a turn-of-the-century opera, is firmly pulled 30 years into the 1900s, where it is revamped not so much with respect to its intent, but rather amplified in terms of its emotional reach.

The dial is turned up because of the dual media, cogently and simultaneously expressed through the stage and screen, which presents the most convincing reason to experience this highly ambitious tribute to Puccini. On one hand, the opera resonates on the merits of what can be observed of the in-person cast on the centrally revolving set piece comprised of columns and Japanese Shoji Doors. On the other hand, the widescreen above paints a slightly different picture, dissolving from one alight and shadowed image to the next, where contrasting angles of the same scene play out, and where the individuals spotlighted on stage aren’t necessarily the ones being filmed. As a behind-the-scenes team aims their dolly-supported apparatuses at the operatic actors to capture a close-up of a disquieted countenance (Sharpless), the profile of exasperated guilt (B.F. Pinkerton), and a bird’s eye perspective of a paralytic powerlessness (Cio-Cio-San), the audience finds their experience and identification with these personalities to be profoundly enhanced.

In LA Opera’s first production of its new season, cultures, motivations, and, more importantly, selfless and selfish love clash in Puccini’s timeless tapestry. It is curated with a circumspect lens, perhaps 35 mm, amounting to a Hollywood blockbuster that is worthy of the utterance, “This is cinema,” to quote one of film’s most unrivaled auteurs, Martin Scorsese.

Cover image caption: Karah Son and Jonathan Tetelman in LA Opera’s 2024 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, CA. Photo credit: Cory Weaver/LA Opera

LA Opera’s production of Madame Butterfly runs through Sunday, October 13th. For more information on the production, and to purchase tickets, visit laopera.org.