He’s been charged with treason for passing French state secrets to Song, who was working for the Mao regime throughout their relationship. We first meet Owen’s Gallimard in the 1980s in a prison cell.
The story is told almost entirely in flashbacks. So why do the results feel strangely uneven?ĭespite compelling performances by both leads - especially Ha, whose Song is a consummate actor, layers of carefully cultivated performance around an iron core whose only real law is survival - both play and production wander into clunkiness and confusion. It’s an exciting prospect: Taymor’s gift for sweeping spectacle combined with a story whose complex web of gender, racial, and international politics feels sharply suited to our current climate - plus a star turn for an excellent actor (Clive Owen as the Boursicot analogue, Rene Gallimard) and a rich, exciting opportunity for a super-talented newcomer (recent NYU acting grad Jin Ha making his Broadway debut as Song Liling).
Butterfly’s first revival, under the direction of Julie Taymor and featuring a script that Hwang has brushed up for 2017. Now the diplomat and the diva - the Western man and the “delicate Chinese girl,” the Traitor and the Spy - return to Broadway in M.
The play is based both on Puccini’s romantic (and deeply problematic) tragedy of an opera, Madama Butterfly, and on the real-life affair between the Beijing opera singer Shei Pei Pu and French diplomat Bernard Boursicot, who for 20 years believed his male lover to be a woman. It also ran for almost two years - a remarkable feat considering its thematically ambitious, stranger-than-fiction story. Wong in a career-making turn as the Chinese opera singer Song Liling).
Butterfly made its Broadway debut almost 30 years ago, it took home the Tonys for Best Play, Best Direction, and Best Performance by a Featured Actor (B.
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