Publication Date: Friday Oct 22, 1999

'Madama Butterfly' soars

One of the principal reasons for becoming an opera buff is the anticipation of that rare moment when sublime music and great emotionality combine to lift you out of yourself in a transport of empathy. And, believe me, it happens: Saturday night, toward the end of West Bay Opera's "Madama Butterfly," there were spirits flying all over the theater.

"Butterfly" is a common culprit of this ecstatic freight service; Puccini's masterpiece is a veritable vise grip of empathic forces. If you can manage to get through it without shedding a tear, you should immediately sign up for counseling.

The work comes with some very perilous provisos, however. For one thing, it demands a very strong tenor and an incredibly strong soprano. The first of these demands was satisfied with the entrance of Christopher Campbell as the American naval officer B.F. Pinkerton. Campbell handled Puccini's rather nastily demanding opening aria, "Dovunque al mondo," with delightful Yankee arrogance and a booming top note.

The second and most important criterion was met by Stacy Rigg, who upon her entrance as Pinkerton's marriage-brokered bride ("Quanto cielo! Quanto mar"), exhibited not only an agile, penetrating soprano but also a repertoire of small, shy gestures and a charming, timid smile that served to camouflage her overample height.

With these two worries so quickly dissipated, the audience was free to settle into Puccini's ingenious roller coaster tear-trap and enjoy the ride--and never have his foreshadowing powers seemed so forceful. Whether it's Pinkerton's toast to the American consul--"And to the day I marry, in a real ceremony"--or Butterfly destroying a doll representing her ancestors and her religion ("I bow before the God of Pinkerton"), the eventual punishment of her blind faith becomes more and more inevitable, and every step down that ordered path another lovely twist of torture.

Rigg's performance was doubly powerful in that she knew when not to use her power. Her reading of the iconic second-act "Un bel di" avoids the common anthem treatment and turns instead to the intimate, conversational passage it was meant to be--Butterfly's vision of her American husband's return, related to her faithful servant, Suzuki (mezzo Susan Halperin). This care for dynamics reappears in the beautifully shaped, organic unison lines with Suzuki in the second-act duet, "Tutti i fior," and in the third act, as Butterfly accepts her fate in a trio of deathly monotone phrases (the second, "My life is over," just about freezes the blood).

Campbell is an audio joy whenever he's on stage, but especially in Pinkerton's conflicted farewell, "Addio fiorito asil." An additional tenor treat is Christopher Fernandez, who provides comic relief aplenty as the devilish marriage broker Goro.

Henry Mollicone and his orchestra displayed a knack for staying with the phrasing and volume of his singers, and but for a single muff from the brass and a slightly off-color entrance from the strings would have been perfect. There was also some tempo trouble with the geisha chorus on Butterfly's entrance--a shame, since it's a lovely passage.

Deborah Hammond's set is a subtle and evocative field of Japanese screens centered on a full moon taken straight from the libretto ("I am like the goddess of the moon," says Butterfly on her wedding night, "who comes to earth at night on a bridge from heaven"). Stage director Yefim Maizel's setting of the opera as a memory play of an aging Pinkerton (Will Beckett, on a pre-downbeat wander through the streets of 1970s Nagasaki), is effective, but not as touching as a San Francisco Opera staging in which Maizel himself participated. In that production, the opera was preceded by Butterfly's son, Sorrow, as a young man, sifting through a trunk of his mother's belongings. It is commendable, however, that West Bay continues to bring this kind of inventiveness to its stagings.

What: West Bay Opera presents "Madama Butterfly."

When: Continues through Sunday.

Where: Lucie Stern Theater, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto.

How much: Tickets are $33.

Info: Call (650) 424-9999. 

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