Calgary Opera opens new reimagined ‘Madama Butterfly’ for 2025

A new light is being cast on the women who lived the history behind one of opera’s most performed works at Calgary Opera this November.

Madama Butterfly runs Nov. 1-7 at the Jubilee. It is a familiar opera, but the production team behind the show hopes that this time, audiences will see Giacomo Puccini’s beloved tragedy through a very different lens.

Stage director Mo Zhou has reset the work in post-World War II Nagasaki, transforming the familiar story of love and betrayal into a meditation on survival, displacement, and the illusion of the American Dream, giving a voice to those left behind.

“The whole genesis of the story and historical interpretation are predominantly being told by what I call European, Eurocentric white male interpreters,” said Zhou. “So a lot of times, Butterfly becomes a very stereotypical exotic fantasy in the storytelling, which can be really problematic for 2025 audiences.”

Zhou and her design team, all first-generation Asian immigrant women, wanted to restore humanity to a story often reduced to symbol.

“We really look closely and try to portray her as a human more than just a symbol or myth,” she explained. “By setting it in 1946, within a year of the atomic bomb, every Japanese character is trying to play a version of themselves they think the American military presence wants to see, in order to survive.”

The shift to the American-led occupation of Japan (1945–1952) heightens the tension between illusion and reality. In Zhou’s vision, Cio-Cio-San’s blind faith in a future with her American husband becomes a painful reflection of real women’s lives.

“It was documented around that time, 45,000 Japanese women married American GIs and moved to the United States,” Zhou said. “You just couldn’t help but wonder — if 45,000 women married and moved, how many were left behind, abandoned, just like Butterfly and her son?”

The design seeks to deepen that realism. Costumes and props are drawn directly from historical photographs which show the juxtaposition of East and West. For example, kimono silks with 1940s Hollywood hairdos.

“Every tiny object you see on stage, we have real historical photos to back it up,” said Zhou. “All the kimonos and props are custom-built in Japan and shipped to Canada. You will still see the spectacle, but hopefully a more emotionally honest one that invites empathy instead of distance.”

For Zhou, Madama Butterfly is taking personal histories to the stage as well.

 “My costume designer’s grandmother survived Hiroshima, and my maternal grandmother survived the rape of Nanking,” she shared. “In a way, this production became four Asian women confronting the shadow of a very dark history, while reflecting our own experiences as immigrant women. We are telling her story through our lenses, not the outside gaze.”

Madama Butterfly runs Nov. 1 and Nov. 7 at 7:30 p.m. and Nov. 2 at 2 p.m. at the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium, with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Jonathan Brandani.

The production is a co-production with Arizona Opera and Opera Grand Rapids, and will travel to both companies following its Calgary run.

Tickets and information can be found at calgaryopera.com/madama-butterfly