MADAME BUTTERFLY • TEATRO REAL MADRID

★★★★★☆

REVIEW MADAME BUTTERFLY: STRIPPED TO THE SKIN IN MADRID

Pinkerton the asshole is stripped to the skin and mercilessly exposed in star Italian director Damiano Michieletto’s fabulous production of Madame Butterfly in a devilishly fascinating modern setting of Japanese urban manga, neon signs and teenage porn.

Michieletto opens the party with a large glass cage in the centre of the stage, where a handful of 80s-style Japanese prostitutes in high heels, thigh-high shorts and hooker glitter stroll in and out of sliding doors as a white Lincoln Continental stretch limo rolls in with naval officer Pinkerton and his entourage.

A refined choice of car model, as you know that Pinkerton usually steams into Nagasaki harbor on the gunboat with the presidential American name Lincoln. Experienced Italian Paolo Fantin (43) is responsible for the convincing set design.

It’s the kind of subtle references that make you feel a little operatically delicious in this 2024 season, which marks the centenary of Puccini’s death and has featured a wealth of Butterfly productions around the world, some of which I have seen.

Madame Butterfly usually features a lot of Japanese folklore of a more classical flavor, which adds a beautiful veneer of poetry and something akin to noble sacrifice to the ultra-tragic plot.

All the beauty is ripped open in Michieletto’s stunningly beautiful staging with giant billboards of undisguised sexual content. Butterfly has moved from the blossoming cherry trees to the gutter of an oriental red-light district. 

Venice-born Michieletto (48) simply takes at face value the story of the too-young Cio-Cio San, who is sold into marriage by his disgraced, ruined family.  

It’s about sex tourism from A to Z. Butterfly is nowhere near loving Pinkerton but must spread her legs in a desperate attempt to ensure her family’s survival. American naval officer Pinkerton states from the start that he’s come to enjoy an exotic adventure before he intends to take a proper wife back in the States.  

Even before his ‘authentically’ staged Japanese souvenir wedding, meant to represent true transcontinental love, he is well on his way to picking on several of the other hotties in the glass cage. 

The plot unfolds pretty much as you know it, but the porn-take insists on the coldness and deception of the iconic tearjerker.

Butterfly’s Uncle Gozo breaks into the wedding party to prevent the marriage, Pinkerton knocks him out, US Consul Sharpless warns of the event’s consequences but never gets his way.

Perhaps he himself is turned on by the idea of a little geisha gymnastics far from home? Men, as we all know, only think with their dicks!

Photo: Javier del Real

Pinkerton leaves after the wedding night, leaving behind a Butterfly who is now isolated from her family and has to living a lonely life on a budget class with her maid Suzuki.  

Every day for three years, she searches in vain for the return of the white Lincoln before Consul Sharpless learns of the outcome of the wedding night and informs the unknowing father.

In a grim, reimagined flashforward that is one of the show’s most effective moves, we see her son Sorrow being chased and gang-banged by his classmates after school because he is different with his blue eyes and Caucasian genes.

The offences are inherited. The ostracism is total. Crushing is a word that doesn’t quite cover it.

Even with 35 degrees outside, it’s chilly in the beautiful Teatro Real in Madrid.

Photo: Javier del Real

The poignant final scene where Pinkerton shows up with his American wife to collect the boy is usually framed by a kind of honorable samurai-style self-understanding as Butterfly takes her life by committing hara-kiri. If you can’t live with honor, at least you can die with honor.

Even this attempt at something solemn is torn apart when Butterfly chooses a pathetic solution and shoots herself with a discarded suitor’s abandoned gun. After the shot, The Pinkertons roll out of the stage and back to the States in their white limo, relatively unfazed. Too bad, Butterfly!

The orchestral playing had a somewhat sharp sound and was heard more convincingly. For long periods I was less impressed with conductor Nicola Luisotti’s reading of Puccini’s score.

His tempi often seemed rushed and didn’t allow Puccini’s score to unfold in all the grand melodrama that has brought tears to my eyes since Butterfly’s premiere at La Scala in Milan in 1904.

The key aria un-Bel Vendremo. (One fine day) was sung to a standing ovation by American soprano Ailyn Pérez, who performed the title role with presence and intensity.

Dressed in tiny, sequined jeans and a pink Miss Kitty T-shirt, she delivered the role with stage power and vocal vigor in the duets with an excellent Pinkerton (Matthew Polenzani) and a perhaps slightly less catchy Suzuki (Silvia Beltrami).

Michieletto’s Butterfly scores five stars at GOT TO SEE THIS for its sharp, conceptual idea, spectacular set design and successful updating of the story, bringing the show into the present and a little closer to the Miss Saigon you know as a kind of musical edition of the basic story.

Photo: Javier del Real

The show was originally produced for Teatro Regio in Turin, which I will visit in the autumn to review Menon Lescault, which, on the occasion of the Puccini 2024 celebrations, will be performed in three different opera versions over the same weekend (Puccini, Massenet and Daniel Auber). Stay tuned.