[Met Performance] CID:286250



Madama Butterfly
Metropolitan Opera House, Sat, October 18, 1986 Matinee


Debut : Yoko Watanabe




Madama Butterfly (640)
Giacomo Puccini | Luigi Illica/ Giuseppe Giacosa
Cio-Cio-San
Yoko Watanabe [Debut]

Pinkerton
Vasile Moldoveanu

Suzuki
Claudia Catania

Sharpless
Leo Nucci

Goro
Charles Anthony

Bonze
Morley Meredith

Yamadori
John Darrenkamp

Dolore
Alexander Myers

Kate Pinkerton
Louise Wohlafka

Commissioner
Richard Vernon

Registrar
Dennis Steff


Conductor
Nello Santi







Review 1:

Review of Leighton Kerner in the Village Voice

?Butterfly? has been rethought. Scotto, who used to be one of the finest exponents of the title role, not only sings it this season, but has made her Met directorial debut by restaging Yoshio Aoyama's classic 1958 production. I haven't yet heard her this year, but did hear Yoko Watanabe's introduction to New York as Puccini's heroine. A slight tremolo threatened to throw her silvery sound off the track, but hers was still the most beautifully sung Cio-Cio-San around here since the prime of Scotto. Except for Charles Anthony's unexpectedly rejuvenated Goro and Morley Meredith's sonorous Bonze, the rest of the cast worked in dull routine. Scotto's new staging, I must add, keeps close to the details most productions must include to make sense. And her idea to have CioCio-San change, for her suicide, into a white robe, and unloosen her black hair as if for a kabuki catastrophe, added grandeur to an opera often starved for it. But ?Butterfly,? contrary to the Times, is never starved for anti-American political comment, and Scotto's staging, to its credit, realizes that.



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