The fascinating road from soap to opera

We had the best time ever at the recent CCP-Music- Artes presentation of Giacomo Puccini’s classic opera Madame Butterfly, directed by Dr. Anton Juan, for reasons other than what you think. We had long wondered of the close connection between the soap opera and the grand opera and that night confirmed it more than ever before.

 Scholars situate Puccini’s story on actual events in Nagasaki, Japan in the 1890s prior to the WWI. The opera inspired the musical Miss Saigon updated to the 1970s Vietnam War where instead of geisha (Cio-Cio San) and American (Lieutenant B. F. Pinkerton), we have Vietnamese bar girl (Kim) and American lieutenant (Chris). In Dr. Juan’s version, the story after WWII stretches to today, Clarkfield, Angeles, Mabini’s red light district. In his notes, Dr. Juan wrote, “Hanggang Pier lang, that’s the connection of this opera to us as a nation.”

Both Cio-Cio San and Kim are classic heroines of melodramas, eyes shut to the reality that their lover had abandoned them. When faced with the truth, both committed suicide. Both gave the supreme sacrifice of offering their love child what they thought would be a better life.    

Dr. Juan’s reputation for visually poetic, innovative, exciting merging of inner space, movement and sound sense has energized his every work. Dr. Peter Holland, president of Cambridge Society of Shakespeare, tagged him as “one of the most exhilarating directors of the world.”

Music critic Rosalinda Orosa, who may disagree with his “flights of fancy” as in the ending he adopted that deviated from the original, still acknowledges the brilliant use of the rear bridge spanning the entire stage, film clips injecting searing realism of the Japanese Occupation, and the masterful directorial touch of the wedding night scene.

Juan goes on to relate the historical process when we served as the gate to the Asia-Pacific sphere. “It is the first time that this beautiful opera of Puccini is located in this period, and I wish to move it from memory into history, and transform from pain to resurrection…This is eventually, then, the story of our spirit as a nation, rising over our tragedies.”

In welcoming a long-time friend to the director’s chair, MusicArtes president Jay Valencia-Glorioso underscored Dr. Juan’s genius that “not only emphasizes the story’s universal theme, but more importantly exhibits its relevant parallelisms to our society.” Juan adds that appreciation for culture begins in the classroom, which is why they are looking to stage abbreviated versions of Madame Butterfly in Philippine schools. And we wish to add, from school to film, television and the Internet which, like it or not, is the language of today.

Which brings us now to the correlation between opera and soap. A hundred years ago, people like Charles Dickens wrote their novels in installments for literary publications, one chapter a week, called a novela. When television came to Brazil, writers produced telenovelas, which nearly always referred to a soap opera with the same structure of installment. 

Since most of these telenovelas were geared towards housewives who would watch while doing the laundry, the soap companies became their primary sponsors and the telenovela became known as the soap opera.

What the soap shared with grand opera were the theatrics, the flamboyance, where long-suffering wives would go on a rampage to kill their lovers and themselves, or like Cio-Cio San, killing herself after a long, grueling aria. How much more melodramatic could you get?

Another popular opera Carmen, this time set in Spain by Georges Bizet, tells of soldier Don Jose’s obsession with the gypsy temptress Carmen, on a stage of gypsies, smugglers, factory girls and toreadors, of passion and ultimately doom, as the jealous suitor Jose stabs Carmen to death.

How much different is this story from that of the brothers (played by Piolo Pascual and Jericho Rosales) who are separated from birth and who find themselves battling each other as adults, and of their women (Cristine Reyes and Maricar Reyes) embroiled in rollercoasters of emotion in ABS-CBN’s Dahil sa Pagibig? Or that of GMA 7’s The Good Daughter where Kylie Padilla goes through typical teleserye discoveries involving her father (Raymond Bagatsing), his mistress and resident kontrabida (Alicia Mayer), murder and final retribution? Truly, they belong to the same mold.  

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