Madam Butterfly

The Met's Live in HD production is amazing! Acts 2 and 3 are brilliant. However, Act 1 didn't work for me, compromising an otherwise extraordinary theatrical and musical experience.

The concept here is to incorporate various Japanese theater techniques, such as minimal sets, dancing, and especially puppets. The full use of these is what makes the latter acts so extraordinary. However, the performance starts ambiguously, as if we might be in a more naturalistic rendering of the story. Consequently I found some scenes almost laughable. It's one thing for a middle-aged matron to play a virginal 15-year-old in an opera house where to most audience members she appears about one inch tall, quite another to splash her on a large screen in high definition video, where she looks 100 feet tall. I kept feeling like I was watching a high school play with teenagers trying to perform the roles of grandparents, only in reverse. There was not enough challenging the realism in act one. Let her wear a mask, engage the puppets actively from the start, even put exaggerated unrealistic makeup on her, anything to make her quit looking like a middle-aged woman trying to be a teenager.

In act two none of this matters because the child is a puppet. A brilliant device! Any notion of realism is thrown out the window, the actress can be any age, any size, because now we're in different aesthetic territory.

So the production didn't define its style soon enough for me. But once it did, wow, nothing but brilliance! In fact, it put the Portland Opera's recent production to shame.