Edhat Staff
Photos: OperaSB
Opera Santa Barbara is hosting Giacomo Puccini’s timeless “Madama Butterfly” at the Granada Theatre on November 1st and 3rd.
Audiences have been entertained by this classical piece for over a century. Based on the short story “Madame Butterfly” by John Luther Long which was dramatized by David Belasco as the one-act play Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan. It premiered in New York in 1900, moved to London, where Puccini saw it in the summer of that year. Puccini’s version debuted in Milan in 1904.
It takes place on the hills above the Nagasaki harbor in Imperial Japan where an American naval officer takes a Japanese wife, Cio-Cio san (Japanese for “butterfly”), the doomed heart of the story. The delicate and naive girl believes in love and in her morally dubious American husband. As she stands vigil for years waiting for his return, we join her in this lush and lyrical production that takes us through the thrill and anguish of love.
Kostis Protopapas conducts. Octavio Cardenas, last with Opera Santa Barbara for 2016’s Carmen, directs. Eleni Calenos (Mimi/La Bohème, 2018) and Harold Meers (Le Chevalier des Grieux/Manon, 2017 and Don José/Carmen, 2016) return as the doomed geisha and sailor.
Opera Santa Barbara is hosting two performances. One on Friday, November 1st at 7:30 p.m. and another on Sunday, November 3, 2019 at 2:30 p.m. Tickets can be purchased here.
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