Weston Hurt as Sharpless (foreground, left to right), Miho Sakoda as Cio-Cio-San and Zach Borichevsky as B.F. Pinkerton perform in dress rehearsal for Fort Worth Opera’s production of Puccini’s ‘Madama Butterfly’ at Bass Performance Hall on April 8, 2026.
Forever Photography Studios/Fort Worth Opera
FORT WORTH –– To say that a performance of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly makes you forget the opera’s unfortunate stereotypes — of both Japanese and American characters — is to pay it a great compliment.
But there it was Friday night at Bass Performance Hall, in a Fort Worth Opera staging that made the dramatis personae unusually believable. And it built to a close that sustained emotional intensity over quite a stretch.
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It had superb singers, too, although early on some were briefly, and annoyingly, amplified through speakers at the sides of the stage. Miho Sakoda’s Butterfly (Cio-Cio-San) managed a deft balance of girlish naiveté, true love and bitter betrayal with a soprano of apparently limitless expressivity. If she occasionally pumped out more decibels than necessary, the sound was thrilling; she was no less arresting in tender intimacies.
As the love-’em-and-leave-’em American naval lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton, Zach Borichevsky didn’t overdo the caddishness. As the impact of Pinkerton’s perfidy sank in, he seemed genuinely miserable. Borichevsky supplied as fine a tenor, of lyric beauty, yet capable of enormous power, as I remember hearing in the role.
Weston Hurt might have given the American consul Sharpless a bit more vocal oomph, but his well-upholstered baritone and awkward dignity were just right. As Cio-Cio-San’s maid Suzuki, Kayla Nanto was less matronly of presence and voice than some. But she filled the role efficiently, her bright-ish mezzo-soprano dipping seamlessly into well-formed chest voice.
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Corey Trahan was aptly reptilian as the marriage broker Goro, with an aptly acidic tenor. Kevin Thompson was physically and vocally imposing as the curse-flinging Bonze. Joseph Park’s handsome baritone effectively spanned the demands of Cio-Cio-San’s ill-starred suitor Prince Yamadori and the Imperial Commissioner. The role of Pinkerton’s new American wife, Kate, is a slight one, but it needs more vocal substance than Madeline Coffey supplied.
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That the characters were so credibly personified evinced thoughtful work by stage director Frances Rabalais, although I wasn’t convinced by Cio-Cio-San’s apparent dream of Pinkerton’s return during the Act 2 interlude.
The set, designed by John Gunter for LA Opera, supplied the expected sliding-panel home, with a rather rugged framework. The background shorescape, with clouds, was quite beautiful, but what looked like wadded-up tissues on the floor were almost comically inadequate “flowers.”
Costumes by Alice Bristow were appropriately turn-of-the-20th-century, with vividly colored kimonos for the chorus women. Lighting was nicely handled by Jamie Milligan.
One of the stars of the show was the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, which played fabulously from start to finish, if occasionally too loudly for singers. (It didn’t help that the set had no solid walls to help project upstage voices.)
For all his bobbing and flailing, and sensitive shaping of the music, conductor Christian Capocaccia evinced little attention to singers. There were too many times when voices and orchestra weren’t together — even in Cio-Cio-San’s famous “Un bel di.”
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After a slightly sluggish start, the chorus, prepared by Rick Novak, supplied singing alternately sonorous and atmospheric, as needed.
Details
Repeats at 2 p.m. Sunday at Bass Performance Hall, Fourth and Commerce streets, Fort Worth. $30 to $250. 817-731-0726, fwopera.org.