Community Night- Atlanta Opera's Madama Butterfly

To purchase tickets, please visit the Atlanta Opera's website.

JASG members, use the code COMMUNITY20 for 20% off.

Enhance Your Visit

Learn about the history of the opera, the composer, and more from artists and opera aficionados. One hour prior to curtain. Free with your ticket!

Cultures collide when an American naval officer stationed in Nagasaki decides to take a Japanese wife. Cio-Cio-San—fifteen years old and in love—dreams of her new life with the handsome young officer. Renouncing her culture and her family to become a proper American wife, she settles into his home overlooking Nagasaki Harbor and waits for his ship to return. Featuring Yasko Sato as Cio-Cio-San and Gianluca Terranova as Pinkerton singing one of the most exquisitely beautiful works in the repertoire. Nina Yoshida Nelsen, Julius Ahn, and Allen Michael Jones also join the cast and The Atlanta Opera Orchestra, led by Timothy Myers. Tomer Zvulun directs. This production includes depictions of suicide and child brides (Cio-Cio San is 15 years old).

Sung in Italian with English Supertitles

Venue - Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre - www.atlantaopera.org/visit/locations/

The Atlanta Opera’s presentation of Madama Butterfly in November 2022 provides an opportunity for discussion and reflection on a beautiful and beloved, but also troubled work of art.

The Atlanta Opera will produce a series of events and community conversations along with partners such as the Japan American Society of Georgia to contextualize and create a safe space for open-eyed exploration of Madama Butterfly. Fundamentally, this is an opera written in the first decade of the 1900’s by a European man, which reaches our modern ears and understanding in a different way.

Our goal is to ensure that audiences and performers of all races and ethnicities have the resources to think critically about the work. Community programming both live and digital will be announced as they are finalized over the summer.

In the meantime, here’s what we’d like you to know:

• Our cast includes Japanese and Asian-American performers, and their participation and representation is important to us. We realize that their experiences bring much to their performances, and that these experiences are unique and their own.
• Inclusion is not only important on stage but off stage, as well. We will bring in advisors to guide our production and ensure respectful staging and conversation in the rehearsal process. Specifically, a movement consultant.
• The Atlanta Opera admires colleagues who acknowledge and embrace the work that must be done to present Madama Butterfly successfully. We will learn from and be guided by their efforts.