Word: madama
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...London in October 1985, lyricist Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel Schonberg asked their producer, Cameron Mackintosh, if they now had an assured career in the theater. When he said yes, the two French creators told the impresario they had a new project: they wanted to update the Madama Butterfly story. This time their inspiration was not a 1,000-page Victor Hugo novel but a single news photograph of a Vietnamese mother and daughter parting at an airport. The mother had raised her child with one goal: to locate the girl's father, an American soldier who had returned...
...trouble began when British producer Cameron Mackintosh announced that Jonathan Pryce would reprise his starring role in the Broadway edition of Miss Saigon, the London blockbuster musical that sets the Madama Butterfly story in the Vietnam War. Pryce had won an Olivier Award as the French-Vietnamese pimp who helps effect a poignant reunion between an American soldier and the Vietnamese girl he left behind...
...vows to save her from the coming chaos. His heart is good, but his head is clouded: he has no thought for the practical realities of her future in an alien land, only for the sweet moment of his own chivalry. Even that fails. In this revamping of Madama Butterfly, Chris cannot get to Kim before heading home...
...David Henry Hwang was a student at Stanford University, he and fellow residents of the "Asian-American theme dorm" used to refer derisively to any female peer who seemed overly deferential, too traditionally feminine, as "doing a Butterfly." Hwang, for one, had no actual complaint against Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly. In fact, he had never seen or even heard it. But what he had gleaned of the plot -- about a Japanese girl who kills herself for love of a faithless American sailor -- summed up for him many of the stereotypes Westerners imposed on Orientals...
...that would keep his audience at a comfortable distance from the sexually threatening story line. One day, as he was driving past a Los Angeles record store, he recalled the opera whose title he and his friends so scornfully invoked in college. "I hit on the idea of deconstructing Madama Butterfly, and popped in on impulse. As soon as I looked at the libretto, I knew it would be fine." He finished a draft in six weeks, in Los Angeles and then in France, where he had gone to mark his first wedding anniversary...