Poor Butterfly

1942 is a dangerous year to stage Madama Butterfly. Although Puccini’s masterpiece is a perennial favorite of the San Francisco opera crowd, its sympathetic depiction of a Japanese girl causes tension a year after Pearl Harbor. Newspaper editorialists rage against the production, opera buffs picket the theater, and a note appears nailed to the house door, threatening violence against cast and crew.

But someone is doing more than making idle threats—a self-styled phantom of the opera. When a workman on the opera house renovation is killed, the maestro, Leopold Stokowski, the conductor who starred in Disney’s Fantasia, calls Hollywood PI Toby Peters to catch a madman.

With two days to go before opening night, the attacks are building to a crescendo. As Peters hunts for the phantom, he falls for one of the company starlets. But they must tread lightly, or face a finale far more tragic than anything dreamed of by Puccini.

“Hardly a pause separates the frightful, madly comic and nostalgic incidents made believable and entertaining in Kaminsky’s artful handling” (Publishers Weekly).