Madame Butterfly

I'm recommending this politically perilous, imperialist opera based purely on the strength of Rebecca Brown's knockout review of it in last week's issue of The Stranger, and also to honor the dream Puccini weaves into his soaring and complex music. "You want to be politically aware," Brown writes of the play's gross but extremely relevant premise, which has a white naval officer buying a 15-year-old Japanese girl for sex and companionship, "but also maybe you want to shut your eyes and forget the words and have the music of the East and West wash over you in the weird strange hybrid harmony where everything is distinct and itself but also together and blended in a way that Puccini, somehow like God on a good day, makes happen. You want to imagine a world where we're like that." RICH SMITH