Must expectations be adjusted — or lowered — when opera loses its grandeur?
Such is the ongoing question that confronts any number of upstart opera companies in New York and elsewhere as they seek to create alternatives to the huge budgets and high ticket prices of the Metropolitan Opera-sized productions. LoftOpera produces neglected works in unorthodox places. But Heartbeat Opera, now in the thick of a spring season at Baruch Performing Arts Center, is presenting heavily adapted and contracted versions of standard repertoire such as Carmen and Madama Butterfly — and one can't help but pose the question: If the art form must forfeit its grandeur to survive in the future, is this a viable way to go? It’s a big question. The streamlined Butterfly — as Heartbeat retitled it — also accommodated the current taste for shows that are 90 minutes with no intermission and an orchestra reduced to a string quintet with a harp. Next week, I'll see Vixen, a version of Janacek’s Cunning Little Vixen, presented by Silent Opera in London, which promises something smaller and shorter but with headphones for each listener offering 360 surround sound.
The artistic ideas behind Heartbeat's Butterfly adaptation was apparently to make the opera as immediate and vital as any good Metropolitan Opera performance should be, but often is not due to the frequent cast changes and fast-assembly issues that come with any house presenting work in repertoire.
There was also a more invasive revisionism at work here. The main feature of the 100-minute-long adaptation by Ethan Heard and Jacob Ashworth was changing the order of the first two acts. So we first see Butterfly as an Americanized bride who has been living in isolation in Nagasaki from the relatives who shun her and is running out of money left by the American officer, Col. Pinkerton, who has abandoned her. So there’s no long wait for the opera’s best-known aria, "Un bel dì vedremo," an expression of hope for his return. But with many of the subsidiary characters cut (who help define Butterfly's character within traditional Japanese society), she’s a woman suffering from questionable decisions. In the higher dramatic stakes of the full opera, she's approaching a state of checkmate, rejected by one culture and abandoned by another.
Off to the side, the production had an Americanized Asian boy using his laptop computer — whom you assume to be Butterfly’s son who has been adopted by an American family, sort of telling the story partly through his eyes. Act I then arrived as a flashback of three years previous, and though this is often the feel-good section of the opera with all sorts of pretty music, the love duet feels rather icky as Pinkerton is all but salivating over the prospect of bedding a legal bride who is only 15 years old. Generally, Pinkerton (sung by Mackenzie Whitney) was directed with all kinds of boorish, macho-American poses. So if Pinkerton is a joke, is Butterfly a fool? It's hard to have a lot of sympathy for either of them. One stunning stage picture, though, came at the end of the act: Pinkerton left her in a highly stylized state of bondage. When Act III rolled around, Butterfly’s suitor Yamadori is given the short shrift by being mentioned only briefly, which is unfortunate because he's a serial divorcer, but is apparently her only possible suitor, making her situation even more impossible. You realize that 95 percent of the original Madama Butterfly is indispensable. When cut as much as it is here, a less-is-less element sets in, perhaps because the cut portions have a far greater function than what initially meets the ear.
Heartbeat's physical production had the audience only a few feet from the singers with no separation caused by an orchestra pit since the string quintet and harp were positioned along the side. Much is to be gained from that. But with mainly functional scenery and a small orchestral sound envelop, the burden of the performance rested more than ever on the singer in the title role. Heartbeat's Banlingyu Ban, according to a pre-performance announcement, had been battling illness all week but sang anyway. She delivered a passionate, credible performance. But had that not been the case, would there have been enough opera left to bolster the evening into something that was still worthwhile for the audience? Even with Ban's conviction going far to compensate for the cuts, expectations again had to be adjusted: You weren’t likely to get a star Butterfly with a once-in-a-generation tone quality (as in Renata Tebaldi) with a long-cultivated sense of characterization (as with Renata Scotto) since such a soprano would probably be ... at the Met.
Laudably, the opera was sung in Italian with some adapted English subtitles. And if there was a miracle here, it was the orchestral adaptation. As much as I love Puccini’s own, I only missed it momentarily, so smart was was the use of the string ensemble in this Daniel Schlosberg adaptation under the knowing direction of Jacob Ashworth. If nothing else, Heartbeat’s ‘Butterfly’ makes you appreciate the original opera anew — and also shows that this kind of adaptation work is, on a purely strategic level, far trickier than anything the Met is routinely up to.