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OPERA REVIEW
Fine Singing, Conducting Help Heavy Butterfly Take Flight
July 14, 2001
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By Michael Zwiebach
Madama Butterfly, Puccini's "tragedia giapponese" is a work in which glorious music and superb musical dramaturgy rub elbows with annoying and creakily stereotypical orientalist images that persistently interrupt enjoyment of the opera. So the problem with a strictly traditional staging, such as Olivia Stapp's for her Festival Opera, is that the faux-Japanese element is too prominent, giving a slightly stale and mothballed feeling. If not for the generally excellent musical values from the singers and Michael Morgan's taut conducting, this production, which opened Saturday night at the Lesher Center for the Arts, might well have sunk itself with imitation Kabuki-isms.
It was not that the production didn't aim at modernity. It had the spare look of Japanese art. Giulio Cesare Perrone's set consists of one wall of a house with sliding screens and a view into Suzuki's room and Pinkerton's study, with the house framed by the trunks of cherry trees. Barbara Ann Gherzi's costumes were also stylish but restrained, in blacks, beiges, and whites, with only Cio-Cio San's wedding kimono in traditional orange to break up the scheme.
The lighting by Mark Dean was more maximalist, underscoring the drama with bold changes. Unfortunately, the spotlights that lit faces through most of the show were slightly wayward, lending a circus air to some scenes and sometimes leaving singers in the dark for a line or two. In any case, it would have been more intimate to use area lighting to light faces.
Stapp's direction bears the imprint of a singer turned director. Her principles seem to be few and firm: Singers shall always face out to sing, only occasionally referring to the person being sung to. Movement shall be limited and dominated by stances and gestures familiar from opera since the dawn of time (thus the Bonze, delivering his denunciation of Cio-Cio San, spreads his legs, thrusts out his hips, arches his back, and extends his staff like a cross between Yul Brynner's King of Siam and Charlton Heston's Moses.) Naturally, we had to wade through a whole repertory of gestures from Cio-Cio San that seemed lifted from some 1930s Hollywood movie. But this production added fan dancers (members of the Moving Arts Dance Collective), who also impersonated trees in the third act, when Cio-Cio San and Suzuki go to gather cherry blossoms. The one truly original touch was a danced interpretation of the prelude to Act III. The choreography was a little cheesy, but the concept was a welcome diversion from routine. A regional opera company should offer more than this in the way of dramatic vision. As Cio-Cio San, Guipeng Deng, making her Festival Opera debut, showed great understanding of the role. Her dark, dramatic intensity in the final act swept the drama to its conclusion in compelling style. From the moment in Act II when Sharpless finally asks what she would do if Pinkerton abandoned her, Deng's entire manner changed. It was a striking example of an artist conveying the pivotal moment of a drama. (Stapp must get some credit for helping.)
Deng's voice seemed dry on Saturday night, her tone a little hooty at times, but I have nothing but praise for her vocal interpretation. She found all the important moments and did something original with them. Particularly affecting was the foreshadowing in the first act when Pinkerton notices the knife in her possession, which her father used to commit suicide by order of the Emperor. The momentary drop in her voice and the bloodless tone were commentary enough. She had many more triumphs, especially in the first act's love duet, when she modulated perfectly from shyness to full, open-throated ardor in the final minutes. On a purely vocal level, her most famous aria, "Un bel di vedremo," was short on beauty, but her phrasing and her dramatic presentation certainly compensated well. Deng's Pinkerton, Leonardo Villeda, is in some ways her artistic opposite. A singer with the natural voice to become a major star, he has tenor "ping" that producers dream about. The voice is huge, too huge for an intimate space like the Hofmann Theatre. And he has no trouble with Puccini's demanding musical lines. However, he's not added any interpretive nuances and seems not even to have given thought to his character. But when the Festival Opera audience eagerly applauds high notes bellowed at top volume without regard to musical considerations, why should Villeda take interpretation seriously? I waited, longingly, for a true pianissimo, but in vain. And Villeda's look of concentrated woe in "Addio fiorito asil" was comical. If not for his size, physical and vocal, he would have been entirely eclipsed by his far more musically savvy colleagues.
Two of the best singers were in supporting roles. Philip Skinner, familiar from the San Francisco Opera, was in excellent form as the consul, Sharpless. He sang brilliantly, with firm, full tone and dramatic identification. He maintained control of high notes so that the whole stunning length of melody of "Sarebbe gran peccato" unfolded unhurriedly and with a finely judged swell to the top of the line. Skinner's Sharpless showed the helpless side of the character as well as his sympathy, a side prefigured by the fact that at his first entrance, Sharpless is huffing over the climb to Pinkerton's house. Skinner never let us forget that. Buffy Baggott's Suzuki, if less well sung than Skinner's Sharpless, was still marvelously dramatically concentrated and flavorful. She was easily the most natural actress onstage. And if verismo means anything, it can be found in the tortured way she repeated "He will return" when Cio-Cio San demands it of her. Everything in that first scene of Act II did Baggott credit, especially the way she listened to Deng as she sang "Un bel di." I never forgot for an instant that there was another person onstage during that solo. There were some honorable performances from the supporting cast. Christopher Fernandez was appropriately weasely, and also funny, as Goro. He has a bright, character-tenor voice. Kirk Eichelberger, as the Bonze, despite being directed to act like one of the gentlemen of Japan in The Mikado, has a strong bass. Jason Detwiler's Prince Yamadori rounded out an unusually strong cast. The chorus, under James Meredith's direction, made excellent contributions, especially in the humming chorus.
The orchestra gave Puccini's fantastically complex score a tremendous lift. Cio-Cio San's entrance shimmered, and the end of the love duet rose to ecstatic heights on lovely, full string tone. By contrast, the darkening of color when Cio-Cio San sees Kate Pinkerton for the first time made a dramatic effect all by itself. Michael Morgan doesn't have quite an Italianate sense of line. But his tempi were perfect and he understand the score's structure and managed some impressive crescendos. (Michael Zwiebach holds a Ph D in musicology from UC Berkeley, specializing in opera, and is a lecturer for the San Francisco Opera. ) ©2001 Michael Zwiebach, all rights reserved |
