I will be honest that I went into @OperaPhila’s production of Madame Butterfly last night thinking that the puppet concept sounded a bit gimmicky, but instead I found it quite powerful. whyy.org/articles/ope...

‘Madame Butterfly’ evades ‘Puccini’s trap’ with an operatic puppet

The short story and opera is both beautiful and a problem. Opera Philadelphia designed a puppet to help it avoid orientalism.

If the basic challenge of doing a critical Butterfly is to not inadvertently reinscribe the orientalist fantasy, staging Cio-Cio San as a literal doll made every interaction with Pinkerton skincrawlingly creepy.