Madame Butterfly (play)

Valerie Bergere
as Cho Cho San (ca. 1902).

Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan is a play in one act by David Belasco adapted from John Luther Long's 1898 short story "Madame Butterfly". It premiered on March 5, 1900 at the Herald Square Theatre in New York City as an curtain raiser to Belasco's Naughty Anthony and became one of Belasco's most famous works. The play and Long's short story served as the basis for the libretto of Puccini's 1904 opera, Madama Butterfly. The role of Madame Butterfly (Cho Cho San) was originally played in New York and London by Blanche Bates and in November 1900 in New York by Valerie Bergere, and in 1913 by Clara Blandick^[1]

Sources

1. Strang, Lewis Clinton. Famous Actresses of the day in America pub 1902, pp. 176-177

• Clapp, John Bouvé and Edgett, Edwin Francis (1902). Plays of the Present. Dunlap Society, pp. 165–167
• Girardi, Michele (2002). Puccini: His International Art. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-29758-6
• Kerr, Douglas (1991). "David Henry Hwang and the Revenge of Madame Butterfly" in Asian Voices in English, Roy Harris (ed.). Hong Kong University Press, pp. 119–130. ISBN 962-209-282-9
• van Rij, Jan (2001). Madame Butterfly: Japonisme, Puccini, & the Search for the Real Cho-Cho-San. Stone Bridge Press. ISBN 1-880656-52-3

External links

• Madame Butterfly at the Internet Broadway Database
• Full text of Madame Butterfly, A Tragedy of Japan (from "Six Plays" Little, Brown 1928)
• The stories of Madame Butterfly, a comparison of Long's short story, Belasco's play, and Puccini's opera.