★★★★☆
Puccini surely intended Madama Butterfly to be psychologically unsettling. Child grooming and prostitution, colonial oppression, racism, abandonment and suicide are wrapped in gorgeously seductive, orientalist-tinged music. As the 21st century progresses, however, this particular opera is becoming more and more uncomfortable in a way the composer would never have guessed.
In America, particularly, waves of controversy about cultural appropriation and “yellowfacing” — white singers made up to look Asian — have swirled around recent productions. And given the Hackney Empire’s ban last year of a contemporary opera in which the same thing happens, I expect that Puccini’s Nagasaki-based opera will soon come under fire here too, unless all the Japanese characters (including the heroine, of course) are cast according to race.
That would be