Interview: Chatting with Phil Chan, Stage Director of Boston Lyric Opera's new Asian American take on MADAMA BUTTERFLY

After an extended cultural exploration of the history of composer Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 opera “Madama Butterfly,” Chinese American artist, advocate, and stage director Phil Chan will bring his new Boston Lyric Opera (BLO) production of the venerable work to Boston’s Emerson Colonial Theatre September 14–24.

Led by Asian and Asian-American artists, Chan’s staging is designed to reclaim an almost 150-year-old narrative and make it ring true for today’s audiences. The opera is based on the 1898 short story “Madame Butterfly” by John Luther Long, which was itself based in part on Pierre Loti’s semi-autobiographical 1887 French novel “Madame Chrysanthème,” and was dramatized by theatrical director and producer David Belasco as the play “Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan,” premiering in New York in 1900 and later transferring to London, where Puccini saw it.

The BLO production moves the action from Japan to 1940s San Francisco and sets the story of Cio-Cio-San (“Butterfly”) as a performer in that city’s then-vibrant Chinatown nightclub scene, where Japanese American performers blurred their cultural identities to appease their mostly American audience’s Pearl Harbor-fueled anti-Japanese sentiments. In this new version, Butterfly's romance with American naval officer B.F. Pinkerton is interrupted when he leaves for battle in the Pacific Rim and she is subsumed by the xenophobic hysteria of the time, and must wait with her son inside a U.S. incarceration camp for Pinkerton’s return.

The BLO staging of “Madama Butterfly” grew, following the postponement of a 2020–21 BLO production of the opera, through what the company calls “The Butterfly Process,” a lengthy period of discussions among scholars, artists, BLO board members and staff, and community leaders about the opera’s long history in the context of pandemic-spurred uncertainty about the future of live performances as well as heightened racism toward Asians and Asian-Americans.

In addition to Chan, who is making his opera-directing debut, the production features dramaturgy by BLO Artistic Advisor Nina Yoshida Nelsen, whose singing career has included numerous “Madama Butterfly” productions; filmmaker/author Arthur Dong, whose research and historical documentaries “Forbidden City, USA” and “Hollywood Chinese” inform the world of the new production; and from Indiana University, Director of Asian American Studies Karen Inouye and Associate Professor Ashlyn Aiko Nelson.

The artistic team also includes set designer Yu Shibagaki, costume designer Sara Ryung Clement, lighting designer Jeannette Oi-Suk Yew, wig and makeup designer Fuji Dreskin, and choreographer Michael Sakamoto. The 70-piece BLO Orchestra will be conducted by BLO music director David Angus, while a 20-plus-member cohort of the BLO Chorus will be led by Brett Hodgdon. The cast is made up of Karen Chia-Ling Ho as Butterfly, Alice Chung as Suzuki, Dominick Chenes as Pinkerton, Troy Cook as Sharpless, Rodell Rosell as Goro, Vera Savage as Kate Pinkerton, Matthew Arnold as Signor Dori, and BLO Emerging Artist Junhan Choi in dual roles as Commissioner and Registrar.

The Hong Kong-born Chan, who moved to the US at age 10 with his Chinese father and American mother, is the author of the 2020 book “Final Bow for Yellowface: Dancing between Intention and Impact,” which offers a road map for ballet companies to reexamine Asian representation. Chan says he was pleased that the BLO discussions around “Madama Butterfly” dealt with cultural appropriation, race, and gender stereotypes, and the impact of the opera for Asian artists, with the goal of creating an intentional and authentic production that invites full and equitable participation, while ensuring that the timeless Puccini score is still heard.

A graduate of Carleton College and an alumnus of the Ailey School, Chan has held fellowships with NYU, the Manhattan School of Music, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Harvard University, Drexel University, and the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris. He served for several years on the National Endowment for the Arts dance panel, and on the panel for the Jadin Wong Award presented by the Asian American Arts Alliance. In 2021, Chan was named one of the Next 50 Arts Leaders by The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

During a recent rehearsal, Chan spoke by telephone about “Madama Butterfly,” the current Broadway musical “Here Lies Love,” and more.

Tell me about your book “Final Bow for Yellowface: Dancing between Intention and Impact”?

The idea for it came out of a 2017 conversation I had with Peter Martins, who was then the artistic director of New York City Ballet, about Asian depictions in “The Nutcracker” and the need for ballet, and also opera, to expand beyond their mostly European backgrounds. As a former dancer, I know ballet inside and out, and as a Chinese American I know firsthand what it is to live in that way. The book is about how we share our culture with each other, using dance as an analogy. It’s easy to push away people who are different from us, and the book is sort of an antidote to that.

What kinds of changes have you made to “Madama Butterfly”?

We have this opera that was written over 100 years ago in Europe. If you think about what was happening during Puccini’s time when he was writing “Madama Butterfly,” the most important cultural moment of that time was the opening of Japan. It was when Commodore Perry forced Japan to open, and the Meiji Restoration returned the emperor to power. But all those things don’t mean anything to us now. The name “Commodore Perry” does not mean much to people these days.

Arguably, for our generation, what is much more defining is World War II and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the incarceration of Japanese Americans in prisoner-of-war camps, and America’s dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “Oppenheimer” is a major film now, and all of Asian geopolitics to this day is defined by Japan in World War II. And so that just felt like a congruent setting for this opera in terms of a time period.

What informed your work on this piece?

I was very inspired by the 1989 film “Forbidden City, USA” by Arthur Dong. I did a Q&A with him at Lincoln Center following a screening of the film, which is about Chinese American nightclubs in Chinatown in San Francisco, from the 1920s to the ’60s, and what that period was like.

And so it just seemed to me in thinking about “Madama Butterfly” as a work, you think about “geisha,” what’s a geisha? And what else could it be? A geisha, in Japanese culture, is an artist, a performer. So what if Cio-Cio-San were a jazz singer in one of these nightclubs in the 1940s? She obviously has to hide her Japanese heritage – people will have to see the show for how we fix that bit – but she’s an American woman. She’s of Japanese ancestry but she’s an American woman, which isn’t strange when you think about Cio-Cio-San in the traditional production.

Is it safe to say that the character’s background was an interesting element of those productions?

Absolutely, because even before it was legally possible, she was probably one of the earliest Japanese Americans – this new hybrid concept that someone could be both Japanese and American. You know, Cio-Cio-San was, as a character, right on that line, even in Puccini’s time. So there’s the fact that we can update her to this moment and still ask the central question, do you belong here as an American? – but Puccini was asking those questions already in the opera.

As an Asian American, have you had your own life experiences concerning belonging?

Yes, it's also a question that, as an Asian American today, I'm still being asked, especially when we were coming out of COVID and being scapegoated for the disease. I've been spat on. I've been told to go back to my own country, even though I'm American. That's the climate that, as Asian Americans, we’re living in, and so we need a better way to do this opera. And that’s especially since “Madama Butterfly” is one of those operas that really defines the hyper-sexualized, hyper-submissive Asian woman, and then we have all these stories of Asian women being pushed in front of subways or followed home, and then the shootings in Atlanta – I just wonder how this opera has contributed to these larger ideas.

Do you think that a revised “Madama Butterfly” will make a positive difference today?

Doing fellowships at Harvard, at the New York Public Library, and in Paris gave me the opportunity to see and understand how the remnants of these geisha stories have become part of things like “Miss Saigon,” and Mickey Rooney’s portrayal of a Japanese character in the film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” All of these things in the water just keep perpetuating.

So to actually work with a team of Asian Americans, to re-center this opera, to find this new congruent story in the 1940s, and to make it about a real, or semi-real, Asian American story was incredibly empowering. It expands this idea that opera is strictly Eurocentric, and for Europeans. Now we’re making it bigger and we’re making the story about American people. This is about our American history – this opera is now about Americans.

What makes this the right time to revisit and revise this work?

For our community right now, isn’t this a better way to tell the story? We’re not cancelling Puccini’s music. This is the opposite of cancel culture. Cancel culture would be saying this work is inherently sexist and racist, and whatever else, and we shouldn’t be doing it anymore. But what I’m saying is we need titles like “Madama Butterfly,” because they're an important part of the opera.

And this is not radical, right? If you’ve ever seen a Shakespeare play done outside of the original setting, or with a woman in it, you’re seeing something that’s non-traditional. And the reason why Shakespeare’s plays still resonate with us over 400 years later is that we’re allowing them to change. They work because we do that. And so if we love Puccini and we respect the music enough, we should take that same approach. Every opera company in the world – you know, you go to the Met Opera, you go all over Europe – they're always reinventing where they set the opera. So this is no different from any of those settings – it’s just that I’m an Asian person.

Stepping away from “Madama Butterfly,” what do you think of the new Broadway production of the David Byrne and Fatboy Slim musical “Here Lies Love,” about the life of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, which features an all-Filipino cast?

My good friend Georgina Pazcoguin – who co-founded the Final Bow for Yellowface organization with me, and who was a ballerina with New York City Ballet and moonlighted on Broadway for a little bit – is one of the producers of “Here Lies Love,” so I’ve seen the show a few times. It’s got great music and dances, but it’s also complicated and I like that about art. It makes you think, from a narrative perspective, whose perspective and whose story is being told, and how is that being done? And as a storyteller, I’m fascinated by that. So just watching it multiple times has been illuminating.

I love the conversation we’re having around the work. Like what is the Marcos regime? It’s still in the present, too, because Imelda Marcos’s son is the current president of the Philippines. So this isn’t an abstract fantasy. This is very much a current living conversation. I think that art has to be urgent and relevant like that, and the fact that it’s stimulating conversations about power and what’s happening in the Philippines, I think is really great. That's what good art should do.

Photo caption: Stage director Phil Chan gives notes to singer Alice Chung at a recent rehearsal for the Boston Lyric Opera production of “Madama Butterfly.” Photo by Kathy Wittman.

Photo of Phil Chan by Eli Schmidt.

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