Pittsburgh Opera takes new approach to 鈥楳adama Butterfly鈥�
Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Opera
Were it not for a simple twist of fate, Eric Taylor might be reconstructing jaws instead of belting arias.
The 30-year-old Utah native had long had his sights set on being an oral maxillofacial surgeon. In a large, musically-inclined family, Taylor was the only one who didn’t take voice lessons. But on a night when he was playing Teyve in a high school production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” the singer and classical actress Lisa Hopkins Seegmiller happened to be in the audience, and afterwards told him that he had one heck of a voice.
They stayed in touch, and when Taylor was in college, she invited him to participate in an opera program in New York. Game for an adventure, Taylor decided to put aside his pre-med studies, head to the Big Apple and give it a whirl, because, as he put it, “I’m always one for interesting adventures.”
He hasn’t looked back.
“Honestly, opera became interested in me,” Taylor explained. The interest continued, he started letting it pay for school, and finally Taylor realized, “this might be something.”
Last week, Taylor made his debut with the Pittsburgh Opera in the role of B.F. Pinkerton, the cold-hearted Navy lieutenant who weds and then discards the geisha Cio-Cio-San in “Madama Butterfly,” one of the most frequently-staged and beloved operas in the repertoire. In more recent times, it’s also proven to be one of the more controversial, with modern observers highlighting the way Giacomo Puccini’s early 20th century masterwork “otherizes” Asian people and culture, making them exotic and alien.
This staging of “Madama Butterfly,” which Pittsburgh Opera last presented in 2018, reimagines the opera so it becomes the product of a contemporary man’s fevered imagination, which is fired by anime and virtual reality. It also has an all Japanese and Japanese-American creative team behind it.
“It’s a story that’s about what virtual reality and anime is projecting onto the Japanese people,” Taylor explained from his Pittsburgh hotel room last week. “It brings it into our lives.”
This “Madama Butterfly,” Taylor added, underscores “that people in faraway lands are human beings.”
“Madama Butterfly” is a co-production of the Pittsburgh Opera, as well as the opera companies in Cincinnati, Detroit and Utah. When it was staged in Detroit in 2023, New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross said “the framing is ingenious because it compensates for the opera’s misbegotten notions of Japan.”
Taylor was Pinkerton in Detroit and will be taking on the role again when “Madama Butterfly” is staged by the Utah Opera in Salt Lake City in May. “We’ve had different eyes on it,” he said. “Each city, each different conductor.”
Aside from Pinkerton, Taylor has taken on roles in “La Boheme,” “Carmen,” “Romeo et Juliette,” “Faust,” “Salome” and other operas. It’s long been a source of concern that younger audiences are not as interested in opera or classical music as previous generations, and Taylor is adamant that opera should not be considered high-flown and remote by anyone of any age.
We can watch plenty of movies and television programs, Taylor pointed out, but “the experience of something like opera, it’s a different thing. It’s not elitist.”
A student matinee of “Madama Butterfly” is set for Thursday at 10:15 a.m. Other showtimes are Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. Information is available by going online to pittsburghopera.org or by calling 412-456-6666.