THE HANGOVER REPORT – Julie Taymor’s uneven revival of M. BUTTERFLY by David Henry Hwang opens on Broadway

Clive Owen and Jin Ha in Julie Taymor's revival of David Henry Hwang's "M. Butterfly" at the Cort Theatre.

Clive Owen and Jin Ha in Julie Taymor’s revival of David Henry Hwang’s “M. Butterfly” at the Cort Theatre.

With last week’s opening of Julie Taymor’s revival of the 1988 Tony-winning play M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang at the Cort Theatre, New York will have three major adaptations of this east meets west tale simultaneously playing. A couple blocks away at the Broadway Theatre, the revival of the 1990s musical blockbuster Miss Saigon continues to play. And further uptown at the Metropolitan Opera, Anthony Minghella’s striking production of Puccini’s popular opera Madama Butterfly – the underlying work from which the creators of both M. Butterfly and Miss Saigon drew inspiration – prepares to commence its run.

So how does M. Butterfly – a play about a French diplomat’s affair with a Chinese opera singer who turns out to be a spy, and a man – hold up? The revival has been not insignificantly revised by Mr. Hwang to ground the intense relationship between Rene (the French diplomat, played by Clive Owen) and Song (the Chinese opera singer, played by Jin Ha) in greater specificity, moving away from the symbolic dreamscapes of the original. As a piece of playwriting, the play admirably holds up. This is great news, as many of the plays from the era have not aged very well. M. Butterfly remains an intelligently-written inversion of the Madama Butterfly story that skillfully weaves disparate themes, agendas, and genres into an intriguing whole.

Unfortunately, Julie Taymor’s uneven and somewhat miscast production fails captivate. Her staging, comprised of multitudes of moving, flimsy-looking panels that reconfigure for each setting (the scenic design is by Paul Steinberg), is oddly clumsy and lacks her trademark unconventional elegance and flair. As Rene, Mr. Owen is out of his depths, giving a performance that fails to portray the character’s mounting desperation and disorientation. However, Mr. Ha is giving a command performance that’s beguiling in its transparency. His Song is complex, convincing in all its layers, and intoxicatingly seductive. One can thoroughly believe that Rene would fall for him/her.

RECOMMENDED

 

M. BUTTERFLY
Broadway, Play
Cort Theatre
2 hours, 20 minutes (with one intermission)
Through February 25

Categories: Broadway, Theater

Leave a Reply