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++ Here is my review for Santa Barbara’s arts weekly VOICE Magazine of Opera Santa Barbara’s production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly on November 3 2019:

As powerful as it gets: Madama Butterfly opens OSB season

It takes extraordinary intellectual and artistic insight to present a wildly popular opera, in this case Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904) while also focusing with sober clarity on the shocking issues and tragic inevitabilities laid bare in the course of the opera’s appalling narrative. With forthright and simple storytelling and an electrifying command of the slow crescendo of horror that is the psychological and emotional core of the work, Opera Santa Barbara Artistic and General Director Kostis Protopapas gave audiences last weekend at Santa Barbara’s Granada Theatre a major achievement; one of the most beautifully designed and lit, simply yet dramatically staged, superbly acted and brilliantly sung productions of Puccini’s masterpiece in this viewer’s and likely most of the audience’s memory.

            Relishing Puccini’s glorious music, Protopapas held forth in the pit conducting the OSB Orchestra, chorus and fabulous ensemble of principals with the expressive abandon born of cherished acquaintance with the score. The first-rate OSB Orchestra responded throughout Sunday’s matinee performance with gorgeous élan and soulful intensity; a crucial emotional bulwark for the action on stage. Shout out to the horn and percussion sections in particular, for brilliant coloration and subtle but bone-chilling epiphanic motifs and special effects throughout Puccini’s two and a half hour-long musical drama.

            Madama Butterfly is a many-tiered and carefully constructed verismo polemic on child abuse, emotional and psychological abandonment, xenophobia and the consecration of American imperialism the whole world witnessed at the turn of the last century when Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet - referenced several times in the libretto - paraded its global reach by circumnavigating the planet from 1907 to 1911 including a stop in Santa Barbara. Sexism, the outrage of forced child marriage and entrapment, the financial dependency of women in a patriarchal system and the abuses that accrue; a perfect storm of inequality and abuse of women that continues to this day, is the vast subject on which the composer declaimed his outrage with some of the most exquisite and heartbreaking music in the operatic repertory. Puccini saw David Belasco’s one-act play Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan in London in 1900 and ran with the story, composing one of the most gorgeous as well as traumatic opera scores of the twentieth century. The composer’s Madama Butterfly together with his La Bohème and Tosca are among the ten most performed operas in the world and they all feature women as powerful if doomed protagonists. Protopapas, his production team and superb cast, made sure audiences would not only be swept up in this gorgeous production, but also enlightened by it.

            The visuals for OSB’s Madama Butterfly were nothing short of stunning, with a lighting scheme by Azra King-Abadi that was refreshingly clean and colorful; harbor-blue tones in harmony with delicate floral pastels of expectation in Act I, shifting steadily to more ominous, swirling rusts and a blood moon of impending ritual seppuku by Act II’s denouement as Cio-Cio San’s naïve early teen fantasies of love, happiness and a better life are betrayed by her molester, Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, who has no intention of taking her to America. Daniel B. Chapman’s projection design enhanced the visual experience magically. Making full use of the Granada Theatre’s state of the art system, Chapman gave the audience back screen “moving art” projections of Nagasaki Harbor, with discreet but fascinating animated actions to enhance the opera’s already intriguing stagecraft; a passing junk, changing seasons and finally, sepulchral storm clouds and other apocalyptic visual portents of Butterfly’s culturally inescapable suicide. Applause is due Technical Director Todd Jared for keeping it all together.

            Stage Director Octavio Cardenas moved his characters about the three-tiered set and its superbly efficient pairs of giant scene-changing shoji screens with the mastery of a miniaturist. Butterfly as chamber opera was the result; intimate, emotionally charged scenes within scenes that pinpointed each trigger moment in the libretto’s ghastly trajectory. Kudo’s to Kentucky Opera for their loan of props and furniture, but particularly their jaw-dropping period costume authenticity circa 1904 including Kate Pinkerton’s magnificent day dress and Goro’s half Western, half Nipponese business suit. Cardenas handled the on-stage movement in the chorus scenes with quiet authority. Distracting supernumerary piffle minimized, unobstructed choral singing was the satisfying musical result.

            Speaking of musical results, Protopapas gathered an ensemble cast of extraordinary vocal power, musicality and dramatic savvy for this Opera Santa Barbara production of Butterfly. Soprano Eleni Calenos (Cio-Cio San/Madama Butterfly) commanded attention immediately for her enormous and carefully nuanced vocal prowess. Gifted with a superb and open high register, her intelligently defiant interpretation of the ill-starred title role was a brilliant and calibrated progression from the character’s 15-year old emotional naivete to her final defeat as a mature mother some years later, forced to surrender her child to strangers. Tenor Harold Meers (U.S. Navy Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton) awed with his magnificently resonant voice and well considered dramatic realization of one of Puccini’s most complex and conflicted characters.

Baritone Luis Alejandro Orazco (Sharpless, United States consul at Nagasaki) displayed a voice of commanding richness and vibrant color and gave his character a touching glimmer of empathy. Tenor Benjamin Brecher (Goro, a matchmaker) sang the difficult part with vocal clarity and elevated the role from its too often superficial use as comedic relief to one of social and cultural conscience. In Brecher’s interpretation, Goro knows the ways of the world sadly and well. Mezzo-soprano Audrey Babcock (Suzuki, Butterfly’s maid); bass Colin Ramsey (The Bonze, Cio-Cio-San’s uncle); bass John Allen Nelson (The Imperial Commissioner) and mezzo-soprano Julia Metzler (Kate Pinkerton) gave solid performances vocally and dramatically.   

 Daniel Kepl