M Butterly

[actor61]

A good friend saw the first preview of the Julie Taymor revival of "M Butterfly" on Broadway recently and thought it was awful. In his opinion, it was over produced and dreadfully acted. Has anyone on here seen it, and if so, what did you think? I still remember the original production with John Lithgow and B.D. Wong as thrilling, adventurous, gloriously performed and very moving.

[+ Cash4Trash]

Buzz hasn't been strong. Looks like this is one to miss.

[edjames]

Seeing it tomorrow. I'll let you know. Ms. Taymor's Broadway future hangs in the balance. She has a lot of making up to do after her disastrous Spider Man fiasco!

[edjames]

I saw it and I enjoyed it. A tad bit too long, but the running time this afternoon was 2 hours and 15 minutes, so they've obviously done some editing. The website says 2 hours and 45 minutes! I think it could use another 15 minutes on the cutting room floor.

Anyway, a compelling story ripped from the headlines in the 1980's about a French diplomat tried for treason who became involved with a Chinese star of the Peking Opera, who's operating for the Chinese as a spy and revealing foreign secrets stolen from the French. She's really a "he" but the French diplo is oblivious, and very much in love.

Clive Own stars as the diplo, and although portraying a Frenchman, his Brit accent gets in the way of fully appreciating the character. Jin Ha portrays the opera star, (Song Liling) and is making his Broadway debut. He's very good, although we all know that Chinese Opera sounds a lot like bunch of alley cats being tortured.

The sets are very minimal and Ms. Taymor makes use of moving screens to create rooms and backdrops. The costumes, while some may be of Chinese imported silk are somewhat bland. We definitely could have done without the revolutionary ballet sequence where Chinese Mao-enthused dancers do a tribute dance to the revolution.

I will say the audience LOVED it and gave it a rousing standing-O and the actors made several bows.

All in all, for a discounted ticket, pretty good.

 

PS - I'm not sure what your friend meant when he told you it was "over-produced"?

[actor61]

I saw it and I enjoyed it. A tad bit too long, but the running time this afternoon was 2 hours and 15 minutes, so they've obviously done some editing. The website says 2 hours and 45 minutes! I think it could use another 15 minutes on the cutting room floor.

Anyway, a compelling story ripped from the headlines in the 1980's about a French diplomat tried for treason who became involved with a Chinese star of the Peking Opera, who's operating for the Chinese as a spy and revealing foreign secrets stolen from the French. She's really a "he" but the French diplo is oblivious, and very much in love.

Clive Own stars as the diplo, and although portraying a Frenchman, his Brit accent gets in the way of fully appreciating the character. Jin Ha portrays the opera star, (Song Liling) and is making his Broadway debut. He's very good, although we all know that Chinese Opera sounds a lot like bunch of alley cats being tortured.

The sets are very minimal and Ms. Taymor makes use of moving screens to create rooms and backdrops. The costumes, while some may be of Chinese imported silk are somewhat bland. We definitely could have done without the revolutionary ballet sequence where Chinese Mao-enthused dancers do a tribute dance to the revolution.

I will say the audience LOVED it and gave it a rousing standing-O and the actors made several bows.

All in all, for a discounted ticket, pretty good.

 

PS - I'm not sure what your friend meant when he told you it was "over-produced"?

He said it was "a show about screens."

[edjames]

An absolutely ridiculous comment!

[+ Charlie]

although we all know that Chinese Opera sounds a lot like bunch of alley cats being tortured.

 

We all don't know that. That sounds like the kind of comment my father used to make about Italian opera. I have a Chinese-American friend who can appreciate both Broadway show tunes and Chinese opera as music. There is a letter in my local paper this morning, whose author claims that rap is not music. Although it is not to my taste, it certainly speaks powerfully to its fans, as do Italian opera and Chinese opera.

[edjames]

The ability to enjoy a piece of music is in the ear of the listener. Personally, sorry to say, I don't enjoy asian classical music. However, I recognize that there are many out there, including billions of asian who do. To each his own.

[edjames]

A very tepid review...

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/theater/review-m-butterfly-david-henry-hwang-julie-taymor-broadway.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftheater&action=click&contentCollection=theater&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&mtrref=www.nytimes.com&auth=login-email

 

Review: ‘M. Butterfly’ Returns to Broadway on Heavier Wings

By BEN BRANTLEY OCT. 26, 2017

 

Jin Ha, left, as the opera singer Song Liling and Clive Owen as the French diplomat Rene Gallimard in “M. Butterfly” at the Cort Theater. CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

 

Maybe they should call it “M. Moth.”

 

Though it bent (and blew) the minds of rapt audiences with its elusive opalescence nearly three decades ago, David Henry Hwang’s “M. Butterfly” returns to Broadway on heavier, drabber wings. the revival that opened on Thursday night at the Cort Theater, directed by Julie Taymor, has basically the same anatomy as its predecessor.

• 
  But it has undeniably morphed into a more prosaic creature, and the tantalizing mists that surrounded its initial run have dissolved as if under a harsh morning sun. When the enigmatic title character in this breakthrough drama about the illusions of sexual and cultural identity is brusquely commanded to “Strip!” by a stricken suitor, you’re apt to think, “No need guys. That’s already been taken care of.”
   
  That’s partly because the show fails to generate any visual enchantment, despite the professional bona fides of Ms. Taymor, the magician behind the eternally lucrative spectacle of “The Lion King.” But our reluctance to suspend skepticism also comes from the ways in which Mr. Hwang has retooled his script to embrace more elements of the real international scandal that inspired this sensational story of a Parisian diplomat and his Chinese paramour.
   
  The climactic courtroom scene now includes new anatomically exact descriptions of the — ouch! — sex life of its leading lovers. Even more cumbersome is the addition of yet another layer of deception for the character of Song Liling (Jin Ha, in the role that made BD Wong a star), the wily actor who bewitches the bureaucrat Rene Gallimard. (The good news is that Gallimard is portrayed by Clive Owen, who is terrific but performing in a vacuum.)
   
  And this is the point where I say, “Stop right here,” if you are unacquainted with the notorious premise of “M. Butterfly.”
   
  

Bernard Boursicot, whose case became an international scandal in the mid-1980s) failed to register the imposture has been the subject of much bewildered speculation and many jokes. (Check out the priceless “

of the show.)

 

Excerpts from a Chinese opera featuring Song Liling, center, are dotted throughout “M. Butterfly.”CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

In the latest incarnation of the tale, Song is not merely a man pretending to be a woman. He’s a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be man who is pretending to be a woman. Got that? Never mind. We’ll get back to it later.

 

This extra turn of the screw of pretense is also directly from the case history of Monsieur Boursicot (the subject of a fascinating book by The New York Times columnist Joyce Wadler). But for audiences who must digest an already complex story (did I mention that Song is a spy for the Chinese government?) within less than three hours of stage time, it’s a lot to assimilate.

 

There is another, even more distracting problem. Once we’ve seen Mr. Ha — who has a distinctly masculine cast of a jaw — in boy’s clothes early on (that’s when he says he’s a man who works in drag as an actor in a Beijing opera house), it’s impossible to unsee him as that boy. Which makes Gallimard, our deluded protagonist, appear even more mentally challenged than usual.

 

You could argue that such obtuseness is appropriate for a play that considers the blindness not only of love, but also of cultural and sexual imperialism. Yes, Gallimard, who has never had much luck with women before, is responding to the novelty of a beautiful actress improbably finding him attractive.

 

But more important to the play’s intriguing and ever timely central thesis is the fact that Song is Asian, perceived as a fragile lotus blossom waiting to be plucked by virile white hands, like the doomed heroine of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” Gallimard’s favorite opera. Such, it seems, is the West’s vision of the East.

 

Mr. Hwang more than implicitly compares Gallimard’s dim vision regarding his love object to the unrealistic beliefs that Western countries hold about the East. That includes the presumption that Vietnam would fall in a swoon before the manly forces of the United States. Song, whose mission as a spy is to elicit information from Gallimard about France’s involvement in Vietnam, speaks scornfully of a Western self-image involving “big guns, big industry, big … well, you know your own fantasies.”

 

But for “M. Butterfly” to have emotional impact, it must make its audiences uneasily complicit in that fantasy. In this version, you always maintain the distance — sometimes amused, sometimes appalled — that’s generated by your awareness of theatrical machinery churning away.

 

 

A scene from the play “M. Butterfly.” CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

Don’t blame Mr. Owen, who works skillfully and, well, manfully at becoming a wimp in a part memorably originated by John Lithgow (and played by

in the 1993 film). Though he has established himself on screen as a thinking person’s hunk (“Children of Men,” “The Knick”), Mr. Owen is surprisingly convincing here as someone who could never get a date in high school.

 

The show’s broken master of ceremonies, whom we meet in a French prison cell many years after the events recounted here, Gallimard does his best to frame the story of his relationship with Song as a love story worthy of tragic opera. As Mr. Owen’s Gallimard struggles to make facts succumb to romantic fiction, his discomfort in his own skin glistens like flop sweat.

 

If only this production trusted more in its reliably unreliable narrator, and let us see a bit more through his bedazzled eyes. Instead, the show has a grinding Brechtian self-consciousness throughout, which calls harsh attention to its less than subtle ironies.

 

Mr. Ha’s arch Song seems to be all too demonstratively in on the cosmic joke being played on poor old Gallimard. Building up the role of Song’s shrill Communist party liaison (Celeste Den) was a mistake. Though Enid Graham is fine in the thankless part of Gallimard’s wife, the character of his macho best friend (Murray Bartlett) remains an annoying device.

 

Most disappointing for Ms. Taymor’s fans is the production’s lack of the ravishing visuals she brought to “The Lion King” and her more recent “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The tall, painted Chinese screens that frame each scene are alarmingly clunky and unsteady. (Paul Steinberg did the sets.)

 

The two centerpiece dance sequences, choreographed by Ma Cong, feel scrappy, like numbers from a pared-down touring production of “Miss Saigon.” And Elliot Goldenthal’s “original music and soundscapes” are usually more intrusive than evocative.

 

Such clumsiness sadly undermines a play that remains urgently relevant. Anyone doubting that Gallimard’s pipe dream of masculinity is still with us need only consult recent reports of the behavior of Hollywood moguls and American presidents or daily accounts of the United States military in quagmires on foreign soil.

 

But even if the romance at the heart of “M. Butterfly” is toxic, we still need to be swept up by the tide of this crazy infatuation. In this incarnation, we’re not being seduced, but preached at. And Gallimard’s grand self-sacrifice seems more pathetic and unnecessary than it ever did before.