Tucson gets first crack this weekend at Arizona Opera's latest rendition of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" before the company takes it up the road to Phoenix.
It will hold two performances, one on Saturday and one on Sunday, at the Tucson Music Hall, downtown.
It is sung in Italian with English subtitles.
Here's the link to the details page.
And here is a synopsis of the first act, courtesy of Arizona Opera, to get you in the mood:
In 1904, a U.S. Naval officer named Pinkerton rents a house on a hill in Nagasaki, Japan, for himself and his soon-to-be wife, "Butterfly". Her real name is Cio Cio-san, (cio-cio, pronounced "chocho": the Japanese word for "butterfly" is chō (蝶?) or chōchō/chōcho (蝶々 or 蝶蝶?)). She is a 15-year-old Japanese girl whom he is marrying for convenience, since he intends to leave her once he finds a proper American wife, and since Japanese divorce laws are very lax. The wedding is to take place at the house. Butterfly had been so excited to marry an American that she had earlier secretly converted to Christianity. After the wedding ceremony, her uninvited uncle, a bonze, who has found out about her conversion, comes to the house, curses her and orders all the guests to leave, which they do while renouncing her. Pinkerton and Butterfly sing a love duet and prepare to spend their first night together.
