San Diego, CA

San Diego Opera's 'Madama Butterfly' takes the stage at Civic Theatre

Published

2 years ago

April 26, 2024

San Diego Opera's 'Madama Butterfly' takes the stage at Civic Theatre

Love, loss and honor are central themes in Giacomo Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” — an opera taking to the stage in San Diego once again.

“So this is one of Puccini’s greatest operas,” said General Director of the San Diego Opera David Bennett.

He says he’s feeling a little bit anxious and tired, but overall is excited.

“Many people think of Puccini as the greatest opera composer, so it’s very well known. It came after two other very big successes — ‘La Boheme’ and ‘Tosca’ and this is a very different world,” Bennett said.

KPBS was able to get access to a rehearsal inside the nearly 3,000 seat San Diego Civic Theatre to see what goes into creating such a complex performance.

“This is Puccini who was an Italian, end of the 19th century, very beginning of the 20th century, writing about Asian culture from his Italian perspective,” Bennett said. “The way he sets the score is vastly different from what he composed before, it’s actually very highly influenced by actual French composition, which is very delicate.”

The story focuses on a young woman who supports herself as a geisha after her disgraced father takes his life.

The performance stars soprano Corinne Winters, who plays that woman – Cio-Cio San.

The San Diego Symphony practices in the orchestra pit while the stage is set for “Madama Butterfly” inside the San Diego Civic Theatre, April 23, 2024.

“This character, for her very young years, is highly intelligent and also very naïve. She is very feisty and angry, and at the same time, has so much grace, politeness and courtesy,” Winters said.

The soprano has played this role three times before in other parts of the world and said Cio-Cio San is a vulnerable character that’s emotionally and musically difficult to tackle.

“Having to sing this intense, complicated opera from a musical standpoint and the amount of stamina and technique required to sing a piece like this — with those two factors kind of always at play — is a lot,” Winters said.

The San Diego Symphony will guide the show through orchestra and the stage will be adorned with Japanese-inspired decor to match the story line, said the director of “Madama Butterfly,” Jose Maria Condemi.

“It’s a traditional setting of the piece — in 1904, 1906. And it’s visually very striking because of all those levels,” Condemi said of the raked stage. “If you sit in different seats in the house you get a very different experience of it.”

Bennet said they took extra care to be culturally accurate in the smallest details.

“We are making sure that we are doing everything with real cultural awareness and cultural knowledge, down to the way everyone moves, the way everyone steps, the way you fold your garments, where the obi (Japanese sash) actually sits,” he said.

The stage is set for Madama Butterfly inside the San Diego Civic Theatre, April 23, 2024.

In “Madama Butterfly,” Cio-Cio-San — also known as Butterfly — falls desperately in love with an American naval officer and marries him.

But he leaves her for three years and while he’s gone, she bears his son. Meanwhile, he takes an American wife. This leads to an unraveling of Butterfly’s identity.

“She not only married an American in the early 20th century, but she rejected her own culture. And she was rejected in turn, so that creates a very dramatic conclusion to the piece,” Condemi said.

With such a powerful story that requires great acting and voice, Winters digs deep for inspiration from the world around her. She appreciates the depth of the opera.

“It shows each character as a multi-dimensional human with a journey and their light, I guess — the light side of their personality — and their demons. And each character has it,” Winters said.

This isn’t the first time that the San Diego Opera has put on “Madama Butterfly,” but it’s a great opportunity for those new and seasoned to experience a show.

“It is a perfect piece for a newcomer to the opera because it’s accessible, the music is sweeping and it really goes straight to your heart,” Condemi said.

The performances are sung in Italian with English and Spanish text projected above the stage. They take place Friday evening and Sunday afternoon at Civic Theater.

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San Diego, CA

San Diego Zoo Safari Park’s Elephant Valley: Get closer to elephants

Published

5 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

San Diego Zoo Safari Park’s Elephant Valley: Get closer to elephants

Todd Martens
| Los Angeles Times

San Diego — Before we see elephants at Elephant Valley in the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, we come face to face with destruction, only the wreckage is beautiful. A long, winding path takes guests around and under felled trees. Aged gray tree hunks form arches, for instance, over bridges that tower over clay-colored paths with hoof prints.

The design is meant to reorient us, to take us on a trail walked not by humans but traversed and carved by elephants, a creature still misunderstood, vilified and hunted for its cataclysmic-like ability to reshape land, and sometimes communities.

“It starts,” says Kristi Burtis, vice president of wildlife care for the Safari Park, “by telling the story that elephants are ecosystem engineers.”

Elephant Valley will open March 5 as the newest experience at the Escondido park, its aim to bring guests closer than ever to the zoo’s eight elephants, which range in age from 7 to 36, while more heavily focusing on conservation. The centerpiece of the 13-acre-plus parkland is a curved bridge overlooking a savanna, allowing elephants to walk under guests. But there are also nooks such as a cave that, while not previewed at a recent media event, will allow visitors to view elephants on their level.

In a shift from, say, the Safari Park’s popular tram tour, there are no fences and visible enclosures. Captive elephants remain a sometimes controversial topic, and the zoo’s herd is a mix of rescues and births, but the goal was to create a space where humans are at once removed and don’t impede on the relative free-roaming ability of the animals by keeping guests largely elevated. As an example of just how close people can get to the herd, there was a moment of levity at the event when one of the elephants began flinging what was believed to be a mixture of dirt and feces up onto the bridge.

“Our guests are going to be able to see the hairs on an elephant,” Burtis says. “They can see their eyes. They can see the eyelashes. They can see how muscular their trunks are. It’s really going to be a different experience.”

Elephant Valley, complete with a multistory lodge with open-air restaurants and bars, boasts a natural design that isn’t influenced by the elephant’s African home so much as it is in conversation with it. The goal isn’t to displace us, but to import communal artistry — Kenyan wood and beadwork can be found in the pathways, resting spaces and more — as a show of admiration rather than imitation.

“We’re not going to pretend that we’re taking people to Africa,” says Fri Forjindam, now a creative executive with Universal’s theme parks but previously a lead designer on Elephant Valley via her role as a chief development officer at Mycotoo, a Pasadena-based experiential design firm.

“That is a slippery slope of theming that can go wrong really fast,” she adds. “How do we recognize where we are right now, which is near San Diego? How do we populate this plane with plants that are indigenous to the region? The story of coexistence is important. We’re not extracting from Africa, we’re learning. We’re not extracting from elephants, we’re sharing information.”

But designing a space that is elephant-first yet also built for humans presented multiple challenges, especially when the collaborating teams were aiming to construct multiple narratives around the animals. Since meetings about Elephant Valley began around 2019, the staff worked to touch on themes related to migration and conservation. And there was also a desire to personalize the elephants.

“Where can we also highlight each of the elephants by name, so they aren’t just this huge herd of random gray creatures?” Forjindam says. “You see that in the lodge.”

That lodge, the Mkutano House — a phrase that means “gathering” in Swahili — should provide opportunities for guests to linger, although zoo representatives say reservations are recommended for those who wish to dine in the space (there will also be a walk-up, to-go window). Menus have yet to be released, but the ground floor of the structure, boasting hut-like roofing designed to blend into the environment, features close views of the elephant grazing pool as well as an indoor space with a centerpiece tree beneath constellation-like lighting to mimic sunrises and sunsets.

Throughout there are animal wood carvings and beadwork, the latter often hung from sculptures made of tree branches. The ceiling, outfitted with colorful, cloth tapestries designed to move with the wind, aims to create less friction between indoor and outdoor environments.

There are, of course, research and educational goals of the space as well. The Safari Park works, for instance, with the Northern Rangelands Trust and Loisaba Conservancy in Kenya, with an emphasis on studying human-elephant conflict and finding no-kill resolutions. Nonprofits and conservation groups estimate that there are today around 415,000 elephants in Africa, and the African savanna elephant is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Studies of the zoo’s young elephants is shared with the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in the hopes of delivering care to elephant youth to prevent orphanage. Additionally, the Safari Park has done extensive examination into the endotheliotropic herpes virus. “The data that we collect from elephants here, you can’t simply get from elephants in the wild,” Burtis says.

One of the two entrances to Elephant Valley is outfitted with bee boxes; bees are known to be a natural elephant deterrent and can help in preventing the animals from disrupting crops or communities. To encourage more natural behavior, the plane is outfitted with timed feeders in an attempt to encourage movement throughout the acreage and establish a level of real-life unpredictability in hunting for resources. Water areas have been redesigned with ramps and steps to make it easier for the elephants to navigate.

With Elephant Valley, Forjindam says the goal was to allow visitors to “observe safely in luxury — whatever that is — but not from a position of power, more as a cohabitor of the Earth, with as much natural elements as possible. It’s not to impose dominance. Ultimately, it needed to feel natural. It couldn’t feel like a man-made structure, which is an antiquated approach to any sort of safari experience where animals are the product, a prize. In this experience, this is the elephant’s home.”

And the resulting feel of Elephant Valley is that we, the paying customers, are simply their house guests.

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San Diego, CA

Man fatally struck by hit-and-run vehicle in San Diego

Published

17 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

Man fatally struck by hit-and-run vehicle in San Diego

A man in the Mission Bay Park community of San Diego was fatally struck Sunday morning by a hit-and run vehicle, authorities said.

The victim was also struck by a second vehicle and that motorist stayed at the scene to cooperate with officers, the San Diego Police Department reported.

The initial crash occurred at about 2:20 a.m. Sunday in the area of West Mission Bay and Sea World drives.

The pedestrian was in the southbound lanes of the 2000 block of West Mission Bay Drive when he was struck by a silver vehicle also in the southbound lanes. That vehicle fled the scene, continuing southbound, police said.

A 28-year-old man driving his vehicle southbound ran over the downed pedestrian.

“That driver remained at the scene and is not DUI,” according to a police statement. “The pedestrian was pronounced deceased at the scene.”

Anyone with information regarding the initial crash was urged to call Crime Stoppers at 888-580-8477.

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San Diego, CA

Here are the 9 San Diego County communities that set or tied heat records

Published

1 day ago

March 1, 2026

Press Room

Here are the 9 San Diego County communities that set or tied heat records

San Diego County is known for having wet, cold weather in February. But it had numerous hot spells this year. And when the month ended on Saturday a high pressure system produced heat that broke or tied temperature records in nine communities from the desert to the sea, the National Weather Service said.

The most notable temperature occurred in Borrego Springs, which reached 99, five degrees higher than the previous record for Feb. 28, set in 1986. The 99 reading is also the highest temperature ever recorded in Borrego in February.

Escondido reached 95, tying a record set in 1901.

El Cajon reached 92, three degrees higher than the record set in 2009.

Ramona topped out at 88, five degrees higher than the record set in 2009.

Alpine hit 88, four degrees higher the record set in 1986.

Campo reached 87, four degrees higher than the record set in 1999.

Vista hit 86, four degrees higher than the record set in 2020.

Chula Vista reached 84, one degree higher than the record set in 2020.

Lake Cuyamaca rose to 76, four degrees higher than the record set in 1986.

Forecasters say the weather is not likely to broadly produce new highs on Sunday. Cooler air is moving to the coast, and on Monday, San Diego’s high will only reach 67, a degree above normal.

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