REVIEW: Madam Butterfly – Grand Opera of Belarus, Pavilion Theatre, Worthing

It’s not our staple diet here. Brighton has it at the Theatre Royal and eight miles further on there is the world operatic stage of Glyndebourne, just outside Lewes.

As February neared is chilly end, however, more than 580 people thought a night out at Madam Butterfly was a good idea. They more or less filled Worthing’s Pavilion Theatre and sowed the seeds for future thought.

The Grand Opera of Belarus are taking Madam Butterfly and La Boheme on a 2½-month British Tour of provincial towns, the previous night Hastings. Box-office Puccini, the Italian successor to Verdi, who also gave the world Manon Lescaut, Tosca and Turandot. From Turandot came Nessun Dorma, the tenor aria, delivered by Luciano Pavarotti that now more than 12 years ago turned on a British football World Cup TV audience to Italian melodramatic classical singing.

Last year, Worthing began receiving live streamed opera from Covent Garden on the new digital cinema screen at The Ritz. Madam Butterfly comes up for the first time next month. So the Belarussians beat them to it, bringing also their live Symphonic Orchestra of the National Academic Bolshoi Opera and Ballet Theatre.

Note the word Bolshoi. In Russian it means ‘big’. The name is bestowed as an honorary title on only three Russian Theatres, one in St Petersburg, one in Moscow (the Bolshoi Ballet’s home) and this one in the Belarussian city of Minsk—a name known to English soccer through its Dynamo club.

Lots of ingredients, then, to excite curiosity and enthusiasm for that night out in Worthing.