How many variations of the fairytale, Cinderella , can you name? There’s Rhodopis from ancient Greece, Ye Xian from ancient China, Perrault’s Cendrillon and Walt Disney’s Cinderella , to name a few . This familiar rags-to-riches story has inspired each generation to find a new “twist” in the story to make it resonate with their local audience. With its multicultural history, it’s easy to continue to adapt a story like Cinderella, which has undergone many variations over time, yet somehow still manages to hold its plot and structure. However, it is a much greater challenge to reimagine a work, like a Shakespearean play or a Puccini opera than an archetypal fairy tale.

When reviving established works, creatives must balance the creators’ original intentions with the impact on a contemporary audience. As part of this effort, opera companies often reimagine works of the canon with a purpose of challenging conventional impacts embedded in the work. We do this with Shakespeare’s plays all the time and it is often expected that his works can be “repurposed” to reflect specific social moments. If we reconsidered Madama Butterfly in a similar way (what we are discussing through this Butterfly Process), racial and cultural inclusion must be factors to consider in how to successfully twist the work for today. It shouldn’t feel any scarier than adopting a minimalist set design for an opera traditionally done as a grand spectacle or changing the setting of an opera to a different era.

As our Butterfly Process develops, it is becoming clear that this necessary “twist” involves examining whose point of view are we choosing when we present these historical works. In the past, European creators could only see other cultures through their own narrow Eurocentric view, but currently, BLO serves a diverse audience in a multicultural city. We can’t (and don’t!) see the world through that same lens in these contemporary times, as our ancestors did in centuries past. If we don’t expand our point of view as art creatives, how do we expect to attract new audiences ? If we want to continue the legacy of these canonic works— we need to have more perspectives and challenge the work beyond the notes on the page.

To examine the impact of Madama Butterfly across a wide variety of the BLO audience stakeholders, we hosted a discussion forum to define critical factors in keeping work like Butterfly alive with audiences today.

We kicked off our fourth discussion with Melanie Bacaling , a producer, opera stage manager , and former singer, who is also directing BLO’s Butterfly Process curated video docu-series and performance project called, “B.” This program features the artists originally cast for BLO’s production of Madama Butterfly . I wanted to know what her considerations are when approaching a work that is about exotic people and places like Madama Butterfly :

In the work that I do, I love finding the motivating factors—what is the climate, when this work was written, and how to approach that respectfully and sensitively? How would this resonate with an audience in 2022? The music is undoubtedly gorgeous and heartbreaking. But I also have to consider, especially as a female director, how much do I want to put on another piece of art onstage that has a young woman dying at the end?

I share this desire with Melanie wanting to break the cycle of this narrative. I remember watching Call Me by Your Name , a film set in the 1980s depicting romance between two men, I was unable to relax knowing that one (or both) characters would be punished for their deviance by getting AIDS and dying. That narrative has been so strongly ingrained in the stories set during that time that when that film ended and no one died of AIDS, I was quite shocked. The narrative was disrupted. As a creative, it can be incredibly generative if you can break a specific story that’s been told over and over again with a new twist.

From a marketing point of view, Todd McNeel , BLO’s Senior Manager of Marketing and Communications expresses the importance in language to entice audiences to see upcoming productions and participate in events.

How do we maintain our core audience and welcome in new audiences? For marketing, what are the company emails and website communicating? We want BLO to be a place/platform that welcomes everyone. We have to speak to the experience and emotion of the work. Part of this work is debunking and de-centering what opera used to be. We invite audiences to come back again and again to enjoy and love this art form.

For me, this is where the friction lies in Madama Butterfly as a racialized work: the depiction of people is from an outsider’s fantasy perspective. This is where there is potential for a twist. As we have seen in our previous Butterfly Process session with Dr. Kunio Hara, Japanese and American artists alike have twisted Madama Butterfly to be “more culturally accurate.”

Eiji Miura, singer, and faculty member at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, highlighted this disconnect with a humorous example from his own performing career. While singing Goro in a Japanese/English adaptation of Madama Butterfly with Pacific Opera Project/Opera in the Heights, the creative team realized that Puccini didn’t write enough music for his character to remove his shoes as he entered the house. In a multiracial production, this issue must be addressed! Eiji stressed the importance of having repertory that feels culturally authentic, especially if we want young artists of color to see themselves in this industry.

We need to consider the place we are telling these stories, and the audience who makes up the community who will be receiving these stories. I am of a certain time in place; I’m engaging with a work of art that is from a different time in place. But I can’t help but see the work through the experience of my own identity. Our identities are how we see and experience ourselves. How do you move through the world through your experiences – then also be true to yourself and accept how the world sees you?

If we, as creative producers, are going to reimagine a work for a multiracial audience, this is something we must consider.

Wynne Wan-Yee Szeto , a member of Board of Advisors of BLO, a molecular biologist by training but who loves opera as an audience member, reminds us not to get caught up solely in identity labels. Rather , the reaction to the music should be the ultimate validation of any production:

There’s a lot of pressure for the audience to buy into a creative concept; and also an expectation that they’ll see a production that is of high value, or else audience members don’t come back to watch future productions. It’s important to be able to communicate creative concepts and convince an audience to accept it. As a result, it’s helpful for any production when there is an artistic idea, to run it through the Board. The most common reaction to [Madama] Butterfly though — is that it is beautiful music. Not that it is exotic. It’s important to remember that audiences come for entertainment.

Another clue for us: the music itself doesn’t seem to be where the most pressing twists are for Butterfly in this current moment—but rather with the staging and presentation—to ensure that the music lands the way the composer intended.

During the discussion session with the Butterfly Process artists, singer Omar Najmi , posed the question to Melanie to investigate this further:

As a director who and what are you being authentic to? Is it the actual lived experience in Japan in the time which the piece is set? Or is it [the perspective of] the composer/librettist writing this piece? I don’t think it was Puccini’s intent to give an inauthentic or disrespectful portrayal – he was working with “limited” information as an Italian at the turn of the 20th century. How do you as a director wrestle with that? What is your role in understanding the composer/librettists’ intentions? If its intentions of the source material are problematic – why do the work? 

Melanie’s answer is quite telling, “Why is the story important and what am I trying to say with it?  In the end – what is the story and why does it matter now ?”

Ultimately, Melanie’s answer returns to the perennial question, “What purpose does the tradition Eurocentric opera canon serve?” It’s becoming clear that this approach and critique should be a part of the creative process for reviving any work from the Eurocentric canon that takes place outside of Europe’ s borders or features non-Western characters.

Despite generational divides and a diversity of roles played within the opera ecosystem on the panel, it seems that the one place everyone could agree was the importance of continuing to find a new “twist” within the classics of the performing arts canon, if it is the intention to perform them as “canon” at all. If we, as opera companies, are going to perform it in the present, we need to have a clear answer to why we need Madama Butterfly for this moment. Our productions will then reflect that and illuminate where the changes must be to be successful.