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Seamstress Mimi (played by Yao Hong) and
poet Rudolph (Warren Mok) fall in love at first sight in the new
production of Puccini's La Boheme.(Photo: Chinadaily.com.cn)
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BEIJING, May 7 -- Western opera is not as
popular in China as Peking Opera so a local angle is sometimes necessary to make
it more accessible.
Turandot is an obvious choice as it is supposedly set
in ancient China but director Chen Xinyi, the reigning queen of "re-imagining"
opera settings, has displayed a masterful touch for either superfluity or
obtuseness when staging the Puccini classic. She does not seem to care much for
the innate musicality, but rather, for utterly ill-conceived extrapolations.
Fortunately, opera is not really a director's art. It
belongs first and foremost to the composer. No matter how you stage them,
Turandot and La Boheme, when properly sung and played, will wow audiences. And
China has a lineup of talent that can fill up the opera hall of the brand new
National Center for the Performing Arts with glorious voices.
I tend to see art director Gao Guangjian as the real
director. He consistently comes up with sets that put the "grand" into grand
opera or grand theater. He seems to have graduated from the Franco Zeffirelli
school of set designing; his sets for Turandot make full use of all the
technical wizardry of the theater and still manage not to overshadow the
singers. For La Boheme, the sets are so mammoth actors have to take mime-like
bows between scene changes in order to leave ample time for all the action
behind the curtain.
The current production of La Boheme opens with a film
clip, which you could be forgiven for believing had been directed by
commercially gifted filmmaker Feng Xiaogang. It's so suffused with product
placements that Puccini might have regretted not inserting all the brands of
Parisian haute couture into his perennially popular love story.
Director Chen Xinyi came up with a very strange
concept: She transported the staging from Paris to the 798 Art District in
Beijing, but not the action itself. Instead of making it a Chinese story, which
would have enhanced the universal message of the opera, she designed it as if a
group of Italian opera singers descended on Beijing and put on the show in a
quintessentially Beijing tourist destination. Except for two lead performances
imported from Italy, though, this is a completely local production, and nothing
is more jarring than seeing 19th-century costumes in an erstwhile Communist
factory workshop, in which political slogans are still distinct.
The performance I saw on May 4, the last of the run,
was a disaster. Act 1 was brought to a standstill not by the two consecutive
arias but by the crew's extremely loud and annoying backstage chitchat. The
conductor even had to resort to yelling four-letter words to quench audience
unrest.
Tenor Warren Mok also fared poorly in Act I. He does
not possess the lyrical beauty of, say, Zhang Jianyi, and might well have not
warmed up enough. Also, the staging for the love duet was bizarre in that the
couple should have started from center stage and gradually moved off stage, as
is the norm, but here it was more or less reversed.
The performance did not come to life until Ma Mei's
Musetta burst on the scene in Act II. Ma had such a strong presence and powerful
voice she stole the show with her boisterous, vixen personality.
Thankfully, the show was redeemed after the
intermission. The Act III set alone galvanized the audience as snow engulfed a
house and bridge. Yao Hong's Mimi showed a fragility and vulnerability so
expressive and tear-jerking it didn't matter what language she was uttering. Yao
is perhaps the best singing actress in China today. As usual, she threw herself
into the role without abandon. By Act IV, she had captivated the audience. There
was not a dry eye in the house.
The story of Bohemian artists is by no means limited
to fin-de-siecle Paris. The universality of the central story - struggling
artists, low-rent places and all - is here botched by a half-baked premise. Had
the story been localized a la Jonathan Larsen's Rent, this opera could have an
unstoppable run and become a cultural phenomenon. I'm not suggesting turning it
into musical theater but the action should at least have been appropriately
localized, as is the title translation. But blame it on the director, not the
singers.
For the rest of this opera season, Puccini's Turandot
will be revived from May 21-24; Bizet's Carmen May 28-30; Puccini's Madama
Butterfly June 4-7 and Verdi's Rigoletto June 18-21. In between, several local
revolutionary operas will provide an interesting contrast.
(Source: China Daily)
