Framing a new Butterfly

Chicago Reader: The curtain rises on a sleekly contemporary apartment with décor that includes the muscular back of a woman warrior against a red rising sun. A man in a T-shirt and sweatpants lumbers in and opens his fridge. The first sound that penetrates the silence is the pshhht of a soda can opening. He slips a VR headset over his eyes and slumps in a recliner—and Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, with libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica after a play by David Belasco, reimagined by director Matthew Ozawa and co-commissioned by Cincinnati Opera, Detroit Opera, Pittsburgh Opera, and Utah Opera, begins.