(re)Staging Butterfly
by Seokyoung Kim and Dr. Charles Carson
Most people tend to think of an opera as a fixed work, the product of the composer’s singular and unique musical and dramatic vision. But the truth is that the decisions made by the creative team staging the work—what we call “the production”—play a key role in our experience, understanding, and enjoyment of the piece. Questions like traditional vs. contemporary stagings, period vs. modern settings, established vs. new audiences, and many more inform such decisions. Central to this discussion are issues related to accessibility, novelty, and even marketability; but also those related to (inter-)cultural relations, representation, identity, and respect. As the world changes, so too do our ideas about how we bring such works to the stage. Over time, Madama Butterfly has undergone many transformations—from 19th century Japan to 20th Century Vietnam to name one of the most significant!—but how we decide to stage this work tells us as much about ourselves and our relationship to others as it does about Puccini’s original vision.
What follows are some highlights of productions that have attempted to address such questions in a variety of ways.
1904 - La Scala Premiere and Early Productions
Early stagings of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly relied heavily on exoticist conventions common to opera of the late-19th and early-20th Century. The fascination with the East has long been a preoccupation of Western opera, as exemplified by works such as The Pearl Fishers (1863), Lakmé (1883), The Mikado (1885), Iris (1898), and later, Puccini’s own Turandot (1926), to name but a few. Both the ill-fated La Scala (Milan) premiere, and the revised version presented at Brescia a month later featured a kimono-clad Cio-Cio-san (Rosina Storchio and Solomiya Krushelnytska, respectively) amidst stylized cherry blossoms and lotus flowers, and the earnestness and veracity of the work seemed to have been taken for granted. Authenticity, at least how we think of it today, often took a backseat to highly dramatic and often exaggerated representations of peoples, places, and sounds that fed Western audiences’ appetites for the “exotic other.”
1956 - Radiotelevisione italiana (RAI) telecast of Madama Butterfly
This televised version of Butterfly, broadcast to tens of thousands of homes in Italy, was produced as a part of RAI’s weekly opera programming for the Italian public beginning in the mid-1950s. Anna Moffo, the 24-year old Italian-American soprano—fresh from her stage debut in Don Pasquale in Spoleto the previous year—was tapped to play the coquettish Cio-Cio-San, and this performance made her an overnight sensation. Avoiding the heavily-exaggerated geisha-type make up that would come to characterize later stagings, this production was generally quite staid and traditional. The studio-based filming process enabled them to recreate the stylized Japanese domestic interiors and cherry blossom-and-footbridge-dotted landscapes of an imagined Nagaski in great detail, further heightening the “authenticity” of the staging—an approach that would shape subsequent productions for decades.
1993 - Paris Opera’s Madama Butterfly
Robert Wilson’s minimalist and visually arresting 1993 Madama Butterfly at the Paris Opera offered a radical departure from operatic tradition and has since been restaged multiple times. Encountering the opera for the first time, Wilson set out to avoid “fake Japanese, cherry blossoms and all of the traditional clichés on Japanese culture.” Instead, he created a dreamlike world inspired by Butoh—a Japanese dance practice defined by its slow-motion choreography. Choreographed by Suzushi Hanayagi, the production emphasized physical control and emotional abstraction. With costumes by Frida Parmeggiani, the cast wore avant-garde attire—more Western than overtly Japanese, yet still echoing Japanese form and restraint. A single sculptural wooden chair, abstract yet evocative of Japanese aesthetics, served as the central prop. Wilson’s staging emphasized highly mannered motion, stark lighting, and emotional restraint. Expressions were conveyed not through the face but through the eyes, hands, and carefully measured gestures. Butterfly enters against the music, not with dramatic tension but floating—her presence quiet and haunting. The initial coldness of the production gradually softens, inviting meditative reflection. The child plays an active role—sitting with characters or miming dreams during the Humming Chorus, where only he moves as Butterfly and Suzuki remain still. Wilson’s Butterfly replaces sentimentality with visual poetry—stripped down, emotionally precise, and profoundly affecting.
2005 - English National Opera/2006 Metropolitan Opera production
The adjective often used to describe this production, “cinematic,” is fitting given that it is the brainchild of OSCAR-winning film director Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, 1997). Despite this description, Minghella’s approach is somewhat traditional, if minimalist, evoking a conventionalized Japanese aesthetic in the broadest sense. The costumes by acclaimed Chinese designer Han Feng feature more-or-less standard representations of the kimono, albeit in a brighter color palette than Western audiences might expect. This shock of color is set against a stark, largely empty, black lacquer stage (its openness amplified by a large angled mirror suspended above) across which opaque panels move in imitation of the shoji walls so often associated with traditional Japanese homes. Most notably, in this staging Butterfly’s child (a non-singing/non-speaking role) is portrayed by a several black-robed performers operating a life-sized puppet in a Japanese style called bunraku. Developed for the English National Opera in 2005, Minghella’s highly accessible blend of traditional and contemporary elements moved to the Met the following year, where it is still running today.
2017 – Heartbeat Opera’s Butterfly
Heartbeat Opera’s Butterfly (2017) reimagines Puccini’s Madama Butterfly through a sharp, contemporary lens. Directed by Ethan Heard and Jacob Ashworth with music rearranged by Daniel Schlosberg, this 100-minute, single-act adaptation distills Puccini’s tragedy into an intimate chamber opera for six singers and a small ensemble. By reversing the original act order—beginning with waiting, then love, then betrayal—the production highlights emotional disintegration and critiques romanticized notions of sacrifice. Rather than idealize Cio-Cio-San, Heartbeat exposes the opera’s orientalist and misogynistic foundations. In one striking sequence, Pinkerton takes a selfie with Cio-Cio-San in the background as she ceremoniously pulls items from her Hello Kitty bag while dressed in a kimono. Later, during their first night together, she removes the kimono to reveal a schoolgirl outfit, while Pinkerton opens his shirt to reveal an “I ♥ 日本” [“I love Japan”] T-shirt and binds her with rope—an unsettling tableau that exposes the opera’s undercurrents of Orientalist fetishization and sexual fantasy, framed through American imperial dominance. A silent Asian American boy, implied to be their son, drifts through the opera, silently witnessing the story unfold and searching “Asian-American” on his laptop. His presence reframes the narrative as one of cultural inheritance, identity, and historical reckoning.
2019 – Pacific Opera Project’s Madama Butterfly
In Pacific Opera Project’s groundbreaking 2019 production—re-staged in 2024—director Josh Shaw and conductor Eiki Isomura reimagined Madama Butterfly as a fully bilingual opera, with Japanese roles sung in Japanese (by Japanese American artists) and American roles in English. Staged at the Aratani Theatre in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo—a longstanding center of Japanese and Japanese American performance—the production honored both linguistic authenticity and cultural context. This bold reworking reshaped the opera’s core dynamic. In this version, Sharpless, sung by Kenneth Stavert, speaks Japanese when addressing Japanese characters and English when speaking with Americans. Stavert studied Japanese for the role, underscoring the production’s commitment to cross-cultural dialogue. Sueko Oshimoto’s striking kimono designs added elegance and cultural specificity to the visual palette, making the staging all the more vivid. A co-production with Opera in the Heights (Houston) and supported by Opera America’s Innovations Grant, POP’s Butterfly offered a compelling fusion of accessibility, cultural respect, and theatrical innovation—demonstrating the range of possibilities that such innovative productions can bring to Puccini’s timeless work, Madama Butterfly.
Photo Credits: Rosina Storchio, the original Cio-Cio-san, La Scala, 1904 (courtesy of Archivo Storico Ricordi); Anna Moffa as Cio-Cio-San in RAI’s 1956 televised version of Madama Butterfly (courtesy of RAI Teche); Eleonora Buratto as Cio-Cio-San and Christopher Maltman as Sharpless in the Paris Opera’s 2024 restaging of Madama Butterfly (courtesy of Paris Opera); Anthony Minghella’s production of Madama Butterfly (courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera); Banlingyu Ban as Cio-Cio-San, Siobahn Sung as Suzuki, and Noah Spagnola as Boy in Heartbeat Opera’s Butterfly (courtesy of Heartbeat Opera); Keiko Clark as Cio-Cio-San in Pacific Opera Project’s Madama Butterfly in 2019 (courtesy of Pacific Opera Project).
