Pittsburgh Opera hatches a new 'Madama Butterfly'

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Reimagining stage works to better address the times is a time-honored practice. Orson Welles mounted his epochal version of “Julius Caesar” evoking Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in 1937 — nearly 90 years ago.

Pittsburgh Opera’s production of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” looks to do something a bit different. It’s not invoking current events so much as seeking to work around the much-criticized Asian stereotyping that suffuses the classic 1904 opera about a 15-year-old geisha named Cio-Cio-San who’s left pregnant in Japan by the heedless American naval officer B.F. Pinkerton.

The new staging is a co-production with Cincinnati Opera, Detroit Opera and Utah Opera that premiered in 2023. The original production was conceived and directed by Matthew Ozawa, and realized by an all-Japanese and Japanese-American creative team. At the Benedum Center Tuesday night to catch the run’s second performance, I wondered how far such a reimagining might go.

The key gambit is to give the opera a virtual reality twist. Puccini based his opera on a play inspired by a late-19th century novella. In Ozawa’s “Butterfly,” however, Pinkerton isn’t a circa-1900 naval officer but a modern bro whose Japan fetish is indicated by the vibrant geisha posters on his apartment walls. He enters into the story of “Butterfly” via a VR headset, thus turning any stereotyping into an auto-critique: It becomes Pinkerton’s more than Puccini’s.

In Act I, this works mostly as a framing device, easy enough to forget once the action and Puccini’s luscious melodies kick in. For most of the act, you’re pretty much just watching “Madama Butterfly.”

Act II is a different story. Ironically, this is because most of the action is between Cio-Cio-San (Madama Butterfly) and her servant Suzuki. Pinkerton doesn’t sing until near the end, so a traditional production wouldn’t even put him on stage. But in the VR “Butterfly,” Pinkerton is there the whole time, wearing his headset, just watching. He’s also our onstage avatar, embodying not only his own complicity in the tragedy but the essential voyeurism of witnessing drama.

A couple of inspired pieces of staging near the opera’s climax add further twists Puccini couldn’t have imagined, and the opera ends on a note more galvanizing than tragic. However, in many ways, the VR “Butterfly” merely builds upon the fairly blunt anti-imperialist message of the original libretto about a “Yankee” who boastfully “seeks his pleasure and his profit” in a foreign land and leaves ruin behind. (Puccini’s ironic use of “The Star-Spangled Banner” has surely offended jingoistic sensibilities over the years.)

Puccini’s music is surely the main reason “Butterfly” remains among the world’s most-produced operas; including this production, Pittsburgh Opera alone has staged “Butterfly” 19 times, more than once every five years. But Ozawa’s conception (which The New Yorker’s Alex Ross called “ingenious”) suggests that without changing the words, characters or music as written, there are ways to stage it for contemporary audiences.

The cast is led by tenor Eric Taylor as Pinkerton (yes, the character’s name has unique resonance in Pittsburgh) and soprano Karah Son as Cio-Cio-San, both in their Pittsburgh Opera debuts.

Two performances of “Madama Butterfly” remain, Fri., March 28, and Sun., March 30. More information is here.