Past Dish:

Butterfly's Dream 2024

Butterfly’s Dream 2024: Programme Notes
Bridging Puccini, Kamishibai, and Neo Noir

The road to the “standard” version of Madama Butterfly was a circuitous one. First came the short story by John Luther Long, itself inspired by the semi-autobiographical Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti. Then came the play by American producer-director-playwright David Belasco, adapted from Long’s short story. It was this play that Giacomo Puccini saw and was inspired by, even though he didn’t understand a word of English.

After watching the play, Puccini promptly got into a car accident and was out of commission for 10 months. But recover, he did, and when he finally finished the opera and premiered it at Milan’s revered La Scala in February, 1907, it was a horrendous disaster, with boos and jeers by the composer’s bitter saboteurs. He shut it down, reworked it, and reopened it in May of the same year in Brescia. This time, it was an outright success. The opera (the second revision) reached New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1907, with Geraldine Ferrar and Enrico Caruso mainlining, and Puccini himself as supervisor. It remained in the Met’s repertory thereafter; currently it has been performed there only slightly more than 900 times. It took 2 more revisions from the original Met production for it to become what we now know and love as the “standard”.

And now The Opera Pot’s version, Butterfly’s Dream.

The challenge was to create a wholly new show with only four singers and one pianist. In order to do this, sections were cut and some characters were merged, but the edits were not thrown away, rather, they were made into cinema. The abridgement of the opera opened up new possibilities that were based on history, and the links were strong: Japan + visual storytelling = Kamishibai & Neo Noir.

Kamishibai (紙芝居, “picture play”) is street theatre, made popular in 1930s Tokyo during the Great Depression. A narrator, a kamishibaiya, uses painted or printed pictures to embellish stories. The thought of a narrator with pictures in gritty Tokyo could certainly lead one to then thinking of the early works of Akira Kurosawa and his peers, that nascent borrowing of visual storytelling from Hollywood that was realistic in look but romantic in feel - film noir. That Kurosawa and the likes of Masahiro Shinoda embraced film noir but with their own cultural sensibilities is where Neo Japanese Noir was born, and now, Butterfly’s Dream with its own kamishibaiya, its narrator, gets to emulate.

The key to advancing narrative and plot in noir is narration. The narrator can be anyone whose point of view (POV) is witness to the story. In Butterfly’s Dream, the narrator-watcher is Suzuki. As Cio-Cio San’s handmaiden who spends a significant amount of time being silent onstage, she is the perfect narrator. The introduction video as well as each interluding video starts with a Japanese line or two, spoken by Suzuki, then the Japanese fades out and English fades in, much like an overdubbed interview. This highlights the fact that Suzuki is Japanese and is presenting in Japanese, but the audience is given the illusion that they understand every word, and hence is brought into that world.

The Japanese-ness of Madama Butterfly is undeniable, with its music that includes homages to folk songs and orchestra parts for gongs, bells, and Japanese wind instruments. But the unsettling, ultimate ritual in it is also specifically Japanese, that of seppuku. To give Cio-Cio San agency in her life, Butterfly’s Dream employs the use of the fan as a device of honour and dignity. Trading her ceremonial wedding dagger for a fan not only hearkens to her past as a geisha but also her legacy of having a samurai father - fans were once used to control armies and command warriors to action, but also as the substitute for swords in seppuku when the samurai in question was too…overwhelmed to carry out the deed himself (it is safe to say, however, that Cio-Cio San suffers no such indignity).

As such, as far as noirs go, Butterfly’s Dream via Madama Butterfly rewrites the narrative of the femme fatale, for instead of causing the downfall of the hero, Cio-Cio San takes it and swallows it to her end, in true Puccini fashion.

- SY Mah Creator-Director & Producer