Madama Butterfly
Madama Butterfly at Puccini Festival 2025, Torre del Lago, Viareggio
***** The 2025 staging of Madama Butterfly at the Puccini Festival at Torre del Largo offered a strikingly modern reading of Puccini’s tragedy, recast as a meditation on male dominance and the precarious position of women within patriarchal structures. The Neapolitan soprano Valeria Sepe, drafted in to replace Maria Agresta, proved a revelation. Her Butterfly…
Madama Butterfly, Grange Opera
*** There is only one real test of a successful performance of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. That is whether you leave with a tear in your eye as no matter how much a director may wish to play with you intellectually, this is a work that must succeed emotionally. Yes, for some it is a difficult…
Madama Butterfly at the New Theatre, Cardiff
With directors jostling to reinterpret Puccini, Ellen Kent’s Madama Butterfly at the New Theatre, Cardiff was a breath of fresh air—traditional, heartfelt, and free of gimmickry. At a time when many stagings feel the need to modernise, deconstruct, or appease contemporary anxieties, Kent offers something increasingly rare: an unembellished, faithful telling that allows Puccini’s haunting…