---

Vancouver Opera closes out its sixty-fifth season with Giacomo Puccini’s exquisitely tragic three-act opera, Madama Butterfly. It’s certainly one of the most beloved of Puccini’s operas and arguably his most successful. In the central protagonist, Cio-Cio-San, the opera has a truly heartbreaking heroine. It also has a cavalier and hedonistic American, happy to exploit a local girl in an exotic land. While the opera is sung throughout in Italian, it is essentially a Japanese story of an ill-fated romance.

Director Mo Zhou’s vision of Butterfly is markedly different from the traditional version that we have come to love. It is still in set in Nagasaki, and of course contains the glorious music and the achingly poignant arias. Nonetheless, Ms. Zhou has reset the story in the historic period of the so-called “American occupation” that followed the surrender of the Japanese Empire in 1945, introducing a political element to the narrative.

Cast members of Madama Butterfly Photo by Emily Cooper

Cio-Cio-San’s (Butterfly) is a fifteen year-old local geisha who falls in love with an American naval officer. They embark on a brokered marriage that the officer, Lieutenant Pinkerton believes to be revocable with just one month's notice. Cio-Cio-San however, understands the conditions of the marriage differently, and accepts her foreign suitor’s love unconditionally; she sings the beautiful quanto cielo, ancora un passo via in preparation for her wedding. Alas, seen as a war bride, she is forsaken by her family and Buddist faith. Such a one-sided love affair can never end well and sure enough, Cio-Cio-San’s joy is short-lived. Pinkerton leaves for the United States with a promise to return to Cio-Cio-San. However, six years pass before his promise is fulfilled and then he is accompanied by his American wife.

Japanese soprano Yasko Sato gives a nuanced performance of Cio-Cio-San. She occupies the stage for almost the entire performance. Her singing is both athletic and passionate and her delicate movement displays a naïve girl and a doting mother. She delivers her showpiece aria, Un bel dì, vedremo with pristine tone and Con onor muore as she bids a tearful farewell to her son, appropriately named Sorrow, with incredible pathos.

American tenor Robert Watson (who shares the role with Adam Luther) is unapologetic as Puccini’s least sympathetic tenors – he even receives good natured boos from the audience at curtain call. Perhaps lacking some of the swagger of his predecessors, his fine tenor voice and stage presence make him thoroughly convincing in the role. He wisely opts to emphasize Pinkerton’s boorish hedonism, rather than simply being seduced by Japan’s exoticism. This is no more evident than his agile interpretation of quale smania vi prendre at the beginning of act one. In this duet with Canadian baritone Brett Polegato (Sharpless) he is dismissive of the Consul’s caution about moral obligations.

Among the supporting cast, Japanese mezzo-soprano Nozomi Kato, in her Vancouver Opera debut, as the unstintingly loyal companion Suzuki deserves kudos. Her dark mezzo voice conveys the shared suffering of Cio-Cio-San’s tragedy. On the podium, Maestro Jacques Lacombe commands robust orchestration from the Vancouver Opera Orchestra without ever overpowering Yasko Sato’s more ethereal voice. Especially compelling is the dramatic melodic lines of the prelude to part two of the second act.

Of the creative team, Lloyd Evans’ elaborate sets of a traditional Japanese home and Ruoxuan Li’s lavish clothing, evocative of time and place (loaned from Kentucky, Virginia and Florentine opera companies), provide a high level of production quality.

It’s likely unintended irony that the Vancouver engagement of Mo Zhou’s adaptation of Butterfly coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon which precipitated the American evacuation of Vietnam; which provide the backdrop for Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s stage musical Miss Saigon – inspired by Madama Butterfly.

© 2025 John Anthony Jane