The Houston arts scene has arrived at a crossroads.

This month, Houston is home to two musicals that audiences and artists are increasingly describing as problematic, even controversial — “Miss Saigon” at the Hobby Center beginning its run Tuesday and “Madama Butterfly” at Opera in the Heights, which ended a run on Saturday.

Both shows have historically been conventional choices for theaters and opera houses — canonical works that often garner major ticket sales. The 2017 revival of “Miss Saigon,” hot off a Tony-nominated Broadway run, is currently on a nationwide tour. “Madama Butterfly” continues to be one of opera’s beloved classics by one of history’s most influential composers, Giacomo Puccini.

Meanwhile, the country continues to see a rise in conversations about inclusion, sensitivity and diverse perspectives. Audiences are increasingly vocal about the ethics surrounding art, be it the behavior of its creators or the racial or gender implications of its story. In the modern parlance of social media, to raise issue with an artist or piece of art is to “call out” the work. Recently, the “call out” has seen a tougher incarnation — the “cancel.”

To “cancel” something is to choose to avoid it for ethical reasons. But it also means to publicly shame those who choose to support the piece of art. The trend in “canceling” art is called “cancel culture,” a phenomenon that has emerged alongside critical conversations about Michael Jackson, R. Kelly and other perpetrators that have sparked the #MeToo movement.

The idea of “cancelling” is that it is not enough just to call out an artist for his or her behavior but to attempt to deny their success in the mainstream. People who “cancel” believe there is a moral cost to supporting an artist such as Bill Cosby or Woody Allen. They believe art cannot be seen in a vacuum, in which aesthetic brilliance outshines immorality.

Asian stereotypes

Cancel culture is not the same as the rising desire to engage with art’s social implications. But both phenomena are indications of a country that is fundamentally shifting the way it engages with entertainment.

As such, the titles in Houston have been criticized for inaccurate and stereotypical portrayals of Asians. Since its premiere in 2017, theater critics have taken issue with the representation of women and Vietnamese people in “Miss Saigon.”

And the local production of “Madama Butterfly” was itself a piece of self-commentary.

Helmed, in part, by Opera in the Heights artistic director Eiki Isomura, the production not only corrected some of Puccini’s inaccuracies regarding Japanese customs but also featured Japanese and Japanese-American performers singing in Japanese — a move away from white singers performing in Italian.

The conversation around the production was not unlike “Don Giovanni,” an opera about a seducer of women that ends a run by Houston Grand Opera on Sunday, being aware of its #MeToo relevance. Or the Gilbert & Sullivan Society of Houston’s decision to set “The Mikado” — an opera requiring use of yellowface that has recently garnered protests from the Asian community — in London, with only performers of Japanese descent wearing Japanese costumes.

The problems embedded in these works may not be necessarily at the forefront of audience’s minds. Nevertheless, the shows brim with images and scenes that will incite reactions and provoke questions among discerning theatergoers. What am I seeing here? What is the appropriate response to this work? And do I have a choice to call out, or even cancel, that which I cannot abide?

Issues with ‘Saigon,’ ‘Butterfly’

Puccini premiered “Madama Butterfly” in 1904, basing the libretto on a short story by John Luther Long. In the opera, an American officer purchases a 15-year-old geisha wife named Butterfly. He has sex with her, then abandons both her and their child. Butterfly spends years eagerly awaiting the officer’s return, and when he does — but accompanied by his “real” American wife — her dream to become American is ruined, and so she kills herself.

“Miss Saigon,” by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, transposes the story to the Vietnam War. In the musical, an American officer meets a Vietnamese prostitute, and a similar series of events occurs, ending with the prostitute’s suicide.

Diep Tran, a senior editor for American Theatre magazine, described feeling deeply uncomfortable when she saw “Miss Saigon.”

“This was a piece that was fetishizing Asian pain, with no input from actual Vietnamese people,” she said, mentioning that, prior to the 2017 revival, Vietnamese spoken in the musical was in fact gibberish.

“I Am Miss Saigon, and I Hate It” was her resulting essay. In it, she spoke with other Vietnamese people about why they hated its offensive perspective. The piece became one of the most widely read articles in the history of American Theatre magazine.

In a review for New York Magazine titled “Why Are We in Miss Saigon?,” critic Jesse Green said, “It’s one thing to dramatize the degradation of women; it’s another thing to wink while doing it.” In 2018, after seeing the musical’s touring production, San Francisco Chronicle Lily Janiak wrote a piece titled “Please, no more ‘Miss Saigon’ — we need to reject it.”

For many, it’s becoming increasingly impossible to find “Miss Saigon” entertaining. Not since the casting of Jonathan Pryce as a Vietnamese character in 1989 — one of Broadway’s most infamous instances of yellowface — has this musical felt so problematic.

How to respond?

I don’t know how I’m supposed to approach the piece when it arrives Tuesday in Houston. A critic’s job involves evaluating a show based on its premise, striving always to be objective and to choose complexity over simplicity. But how does a critic evaluate pitch, costume design and choreography when these elements are there to serve an intolerable premise?

It was certainly strange to sit through Opera in the Heights’ “Madama Butterfly,” a confounding combination of beautiful music and disturbing storyline, in which even the most Japanese interpretation possible cannot avoid Orientalist caricature.

“Miss Saigon’s” progenitor, it appears, is no less difficult to stage in 2019.

“I asked myself, how can we reclaim the Japanese-ness of ‘Madame Butterfly’? The conclusion I’ve drawn is that it’s not entirely possible, just because of the source material,” said Isomura, who co-wrote (with Josh Shaw) a new Japanese translation of the opera.

Isomura describes his behemoth task — to create a version of “Madama Butterfly” that felt more truthful to the Japanese perspective. But he encountered cringe-worthy scene after scene, including a moment in which Butterfly tells her American husband, “We are a small people who appreciate small things.”

The opera conflates Buddhism with Shintoism, Isomura says. It does not ask for Japanese characters to take off their shoes when entering indoors. And it has a “long history of yellowface performance, in which non-Asian performers don make-up to ‘look the part,’” Isomura writes in the show’s program notes.

At first, I did not fully understand why Isomura wanted to tackle such a problematic opera. But during our conversation, as Isomura described the meticulous process in creating and casting for the production, I empathized with the plight of an artist of Japanese descent, tasked with “flipping the lens,” as Isomura says, of a fundamentally Orientalist work — even while wanting to “cancel” the opera.

“If cancel culture rendered ‘Madama Butterfly’ irrelevant, then I’d be very sad,” Isomura said. “We ought to learn about the history of cultural appropriation. We ought to frame this piece as part of that tradition. In 2019, there are new ways of engaging with it.”

Tran, the American Theatre editor, echoes Isomura’s sentiments on cancel culture.

“I don’t think cancel culture is realistic,” she said. “What’s more realistic is trying to reconcile the different narratives, reconciling the fact that this thing that makes you cry, laugh and touches all the pleasure centers in your brain — is also hurtful to a lot of people. Trying to live in the gray area is a better exercise than, ‘This thing is good’ or ‘This thing is bad.’”

wchen@chron.com