Gay director Matthew Ozawa has grappled with Madama Butterfly throughout his career. Now at the Lyric Opera of Chicago through April 12, Ozawa’s updated take on composer Giacomo Puccini’s classic 1904 tragedy is bound to raise some eyebrows among opera traditionalists.
“The base of our concept is stating that this is a fantasy and that this is not a reality of Japan or Japanese people,” Ozawa said. “This is a fantasy of a western view of that.”
As the fourth generation son of a Japanese-American father and a Caucasian-American mother, Ozawa wanted to find a new way into staging Madama Butterfly. Ozawa’s Madama Butterfly debuted in July of 2023 at Cincinnati Opera as a co-production with Detroit Opera, Pittsburgh Opera and Utah Opera.
“I’m honored that it’s being presented at Lyric,” said Ozawa, who has been the company’s chief artistic administration officer since 2022. “We are amplifying it, making shifts and changes.”
Ozawa notably assembled an all-female design team of Japanese heritage for this production. They include costume designer Maiko Matsushima, lighting designer Yuki Nakase Link and set designer Kimie Nishikawa from the dots design collective.
“Right off the bat, they said that they did not feel connected to the character of Butterfly—that they did not feel that she represented them as Japanese women,” Ozawa said. “We dissected the sort of ‘why’ about that.”
Ozawa pointed out that the storytelling sources are all western for this popular Italian work set in Japan. Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica’s opera libretto was based on David Belasco’s 1900 Broadway play Madame Butterfly, which was inspired by John Luther Long’s 1898 short story adaptation of Pierre Loti’s 1887 French novel Madame Chrysanthème.
Though an undisputed masterpiece of operatic storytelling, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly has not been immune to criticism in recent decades. Many have found the opera’s plot of an American sailor who exploits and abandons a young Japanese bride to be repugnant.
“Yellow-face” makeup and casting controversies have hit both Madama Butterfly and especially its derivative 1989 West End and Broadway musical adaptation Miss Saigon. Madama Butterfly has also been pilloried for globally popularizing the storytelling trope that an Asian woman will willingly die for an unfaithful westerner.
Ozawa and his design team’s way into staging Madama Butterfly for today was to lean into the west’s ongoing fascination with Japanese objects and culture stretching back from the mid-19th century up through to today.
Rather than traditionally starting in the Japanese city of Nagasaki in the early 20th century, Ozawa’s Madama Butterfly opens in a contemporary apartment of a Caucasian man who is so obsessed with Japanese pop culture that it dominates his home decor. Then this gamer guy dons a virtual reality headset to become the sailor B.F. Pinkerton in a computer-generated “Japanese” world where such Madama Butterfly characters of Cio-Cio-San and her servant, Suzuki, both have colorful hair as seen in anime cartoons or manga comic books.
“It’s been amazing to witness not only our viewpoint changing every time we revive it, but also the nature of the zeitgeist of society shifting and how this piece resonates differently in different cities at different times,” Ozawa said.
How audiences take in this Madama Butterfly will undoubtedly be colored by their familiarity with the increased use of virtual reality gaming and generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in both work and on social media. And though Ozawa said that he and his design team are not demonizing lovers of Japanese pop culture or die-hard gamers, they did want to look at the risks of technology enabling many people to disassociate from reality.
“The focus always has been how can we honor the opera, honor the tradition and enable folks who love the tradition to still enjoy everything they love about it,” Ozawa said.
At the same time, Ozawa wants to welcome in new audiences who might have concerns about some of the more controversial aspects of Madama Butterfly. He hopes to show how a more representative group of artists with Asian heritage have both thoughtfully and playfully re-approached this classic Italian opera set in Japan.
“This is a very colorful production that has a lot of pizazz to it,” Ozawa said. “I always joke that I love to throw fuchsia into my shows. Obviously I didn’t do that when I directed Fidelio last season, but it’s my own little gay touch.”
Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Madama Butterfly plays nine performances from March 14 through April 12 at the Lyric Opera House, 20 N. Wacker Drive. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. March 14 and 28, 7 p.m. March 19, 31 and April 6 and 2 p.m. March 22, 25, April 9 and 12. In Italian with projected English translations. Tickets are $47-$389. Call 312-827-5600 or visit LyricOpera.org.