Letting Loose Yet Another ‘Butterfly’

L.A. Opera schedules “Madama Butterfly” often. That, for opera lovers with long lists of works that they are dying to see staged, is a frustration. And travel hardly helps: San Francisco Opera is presently mounting “Butterfly” as well, the same production that Opera Pacific borrowed to open its current season.

But a large public, whether people who simply can’t get enough of Puccini’s tragic geisha or a newer crowd for whom it remains a novelty, doesn’t seem to mind. Geishas, moreover, are in vogue, now that the novel “Memoirs of a Geisha” has long been on the bestseller list and will soon be the subject of a new Steven Spielberg film. L.A. Opera reports no trouble selling tickets to its seven performances of its 1991 production, which returned Sunday night to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

The production, originally conceived by Ian Judge and now in the hands of director Christopher Harlan, has, over the years, settled into pleasant routine. The unit set of a Japanese house on a lonely, sandy hill is attractive, except in the harsh light of the third-act sunrise, which reveals a bit of wear, or in the garish glow of the blood-red frame at the end (a clunky touch). But it has lost much of its theatrical foundation, if it ever had one. The individual personalities of veteran “Butterfly” singers control the evening, and to a very curious and probably unexpected result.

Veteran is understatement for Yoko Watanabe, whose biography in the program boasts that the Japanese soprano has sung the title role more than 400 times, a statistic for the Guinness Book of World Records. Neither young nor demure, she is a confident, even aggressive Cio-Cio San. Indeed, while most Butterflys are Western singers who try to adopt what they feel is a refined Asian sensibility, Watanabe seems just the opposite in her overeager assumption of the tired conventions of Italian opera. She is an unsubtle actress who mugs every emotion with enough exaggeration to reach the last row of the balcony and beyond. Her voice, likewise, lacks elegance and was initially tremulous, but she does have the power and control to match her melodramatic interpretation.

The American tenor, Richard Leech, is also an experienced and well-known Pinkerton. He, too, exhibited difficulty at first with a pure tone, although not disastrously so and not for too long. He, too, is an enthusiastic stage personality, but this time seeming less the ugly American who callously marries the guileless teenage geisha than a clueless sailor snared in a calculating geisha’s trap. His remorse is strong, as is her resolve to kill herself from, it seems, spite and anger, not sorrow. Consequently, our compassion, however wrongly, deflects to the sailor.

In many ways, the opera is best understood in this performance through the secondary characters. The baritone, John Atkins, is a superb Sharpless, an unusually angry and outraged American consul, furious with the irresponsible behavior of both Pinkerton and Butterfly and by his having to clean up their mess. Suzanna Guzman is something of a sad-sack Suzuki, but she does a much more sympathetic job of conveying Cio-Cio San’s tragedy than does the narcissistic heroine herself.

Francis Egerton, Goro, scurried about as weasly characters in Italian opera often do. It was hard to take Malcolm MacKenzie’s Yamadori as a serious prospect for Cio-Cio San with his wig line showing. Louis Lebherz was a sonorous Bonze; Catherine Ireland, a stately Kate Pinkerton; Rachel T. Wood, a cute Trouble. Conductor Marco Guidarini kept the performance moving smoothly and without undue incident.

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* “Madama Butterfly” continues Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 1 p.m., Jan. 19, 23, 26, 28, at 7:30 p.m.; $25-$137; Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 365-3500.