How do two people, who come from completely different worlds, communicate when neither can speak the other’s language? It’s a question that plagued Josh Shaw, the director/designer and librettist of Pacific Opera Project’s production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. His multi-language production of this tear-jerker opera opened on Saturday night and has two additional performances at the Aratani Theatre in Little Tokyo on April 13th and 14th.
In the opera, an American naval officer (Peter Lake) falls in love with a Japanese girl (Keiko Clark.) They get married and he returns to America. She is desperately in love with him and is pregnant. He continues his life in America until circumstances require he return, with his American wife, to Japan. If the story sounds familiar, but you’ve never attended the opera, you might have seen it as the foundation for the musical Miss Saigon.
Puccini wrote this opera, with his librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, in Italian. A language neither the American officer nor the Japanese girl would natively sing. Pacific Opera Project has reworked the opera so that the native languages of the characters are being sung. So how do these two communicate their love and troubles to one another?
Shaw has cast Japanese-American artists for all the appropriate roles – including the chorus. The English speaking characters will also sing in English.
This production is co-financed with Houston’s Opera in the Heights where performances begin there on April 26th.
Read our interview with Josh Shaw here.