Reporter | Chen Jiajing Lin Ziren
Edit | Lin Zi people
1【Shanghai】Chinese version of the musical "Agatha"
Performance period: December 22, 2021 - January 16, 2022
Venue: China Grand Theatre
Agatha Christie is a famous British detective novelist and playwright. Her creative career lasted more than 50 years, creating more than 80 detective novels, and her representative works "Murder on the Orient Express", "Massacre on the Nile" and "No One Survived" are also well known to Chinese readers. The musical Agatha tells the story of the legendary detective novelist. In 1926, Roger's Doubts was officially published, a cross-era work that combines narrative tricks and human nature analysis, which was considered by later generations to establish Agatha's unshakable position in the field of detective literature, but it was controversial at the beginning of publication. Faced with the doubts of readers and the difficulties of publishers, and the pain of her mother's death and the betrayal of her beloved, on December 3, Agatha Christie disappeared.
The musical "Agatha" is based on the real events of "Agatha's disappearance for 11 days" and interprets the various reasons behind this event. While paying tribute to "Roger's Doubt", the real characters and fictional characters are intertwined in the play, presenting the audience with a gentle, strong and intelligent woman. The Chinese version of the musical "Agatha" is produced by the main creative team of China and South Korea, and musical actors such as Zhu Fu and Zheng Yunlong participate.
A Letter to an Unborn Child
Performance period: December 24, 2021 - January 9, 2022
Venue: Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center
"Last night I knew of your presence, the aura of life that had escaped from nothingness; I lay in bed, my eyes wide open in the darkness, and suddenly I was pretty sure: You were there. You exist. It was as if a bullet had hit me, and my heart stopped beating. When the heart beats again, infinite wonder strikes like a hail of bullets..." "Letter to an unborn child" is a semi-autobiographical novel by Oriana Fallaci, an Italian journalist and writer known as the "Queen of 20th-Century Interviews." In this book, a single mother tells the fetus in her belly with great honesty and courage about her thoughts and confusion about gender, maternal position and female identity, expresses her complex feelings of love and fear for her unborn child, and questions the injustices encountered by mothers for thousands of years.
In the play of the same name, based on this work, the three actresses work together to play the pregnant woman, but each has to play a male doctor, a female doctor, a newspaper owner, a mother, a father, a grandmother, a child and other roles. In the performance, the mysterious and ethereal hand disc music leads the audience into the vast but little-known female world in terms of hearing, understanding the many complexities under the words of "great motherhood". Director Zhou Ke said that after reading the novel, her first feeling was that it was an "anti-drama" novel, there was no storyline, and each chapter discussed a topic, but she accepted the challenge of adapting the work. In her opinion, "theater has a broader meaning in today's society, and everyone enters the theater not only to see a story, but also to provide an opportunity for the audience and the creator to discuss some topics together on and offstage." In addition to seeing it happen in this field, the discussion after leaving this theater is more meaningful. So, I'm more concerned about whether the audience can extend it into their own lives when they walk out of the theater. ”
Chinese version of the musical Sherlock Holmes: Secrets of The Andersons
Performance time: January 6-13
Venue: Yunfeng Theatre
Sherlock Holmes, the father of detective fiction Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of the world's most popular detective characters, and his stories have been adapted in various art forms to attract generations of detective story fans. The musical Sherlock Holmes: The Secret of The Anderson Family brings Holmes's story to the stage of the musical, a completely new story, but it should not disappoint the audience in terms of suspense and reasoning. The original premiere of the show set a record of selling out in three days, and the Japanese version also achieved good results. In this version of The Sherlock Holmes Detective Story, Holmes is given a more paranoid, sensual, and even humorous side, and the assistant Watson is set as a woman like the American drama "Basic Deduction". Lu Yucheng, the original Korean screenwriter and director of the play, said that the choice to let Watson "surname transfer" was to soften the dramatic state of "flowing to the male center", but also for the balance of music - there are many parts of Holmes and Watson's heavy singing in the play, and women's voices are more likely to shine.
Chinese version of the musical "Fan Letter"
Performance time: January 13-16
Venue: Shanghai Cultural Square
The musical "Fan Letter" won the first prize of the 2016 Korean original musical theater collection project "Global Musical Live" and ranked first in the selection list of major musicals, receiving wide acclaim since its premiere in South Korea in 2016, and is praised as "a work that rewrites the history of Korean original musical theater". In 2018, "Fan Letter" came to Shanghai to perform, leaving a deep impression on the Shanghai audience. The Chinese edition of "Fan Letters" produced by Shanghai Culture Square has a lot of efforts in local adaptations - in the 1940s, Both China and South Korea were invaded by Japanese imperialism, and the literary circles of the two countries were also in the golden period of modern literary development, and similar national memories and literary development contexts established the basis for the adaptation of "Fan Letters".
In the Chinese edition of Fan Letters, the story takes place in Shanghai during the "Lonely Island" period in the 1940s. In the public concession, writers led by the novelist Haiming formed the "Seven People's Society" and insisted on the magazine "Chaohua". Zheng Weilan, who has just entered the newsroom, has a secret in his heart: he has long corresponded with Haiming under the pseudonym "Xia Guang". During this period, the image of "Xia Guang" was constantly improved in his pen, becoming a muse-like existence, and her appearance brought light to Haiming and Wei Lan, and also brought nightmares. When Haiming dies, his letters will be published soon, and the identity of "Xia Guang" will have to be revealed... Bai Yixun, the actor of Hai Zhen (Hai Ming) in the original "Fan Letter", believes that "'Fan Letter' tells the pain of a specific era background, especially the pain of intellectuals and literati. ”
【Beijing】
Dance poetry drama "Only this green"
Performance time: January 21 - January 23
Venue: Beijing Tianqiao Art Center , Coliseum
"A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" is a silk color painting created by Wang Ximeng of the Northern Song Dynasty, which depicts a wonderful landscape map of Jiangnan in the form of a long scroll, pushing the green landscape painting to the peak of development. The dance poetry drama "Only This Green" takes "poetry drama" as the genre and creatively transforms "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" through dance, so that the audience can feel the Chinese aesthetic interest of "throwing out a new one again" like a painting.
The play adopts the structure of interlacing time and space for narrative, and the plot is set to the real time when "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" is about to be exhibited, while in another time and space, the young painter Xi Meng, who was a thousand years ago, is about to finish the manuscript. A modern Forbidden City researcher, because of his deep study of "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains", walked into the heart of Xi Meng, accompanied him to draw the "Map of a Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains", and explored the accident and inevitability of his "unique steps and thousands of years". The rich layers of paintings outlined on the stage can not only help the audience understand the moving features of "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains", but also establish an emotional connection between ancient cultural relics and modern people.
Li Xing Dance Theater "The Grand Hotel"
Theater of Performance: National Centre for the Performing Arts Drama Theatre
As a professional dancer, Li Xing has been touring the world alone for many years, and the hotel has become his temporary "home". In the loneliness of being in a foreign land, Li Xing began to observe the guests in this "home", and their subtle movements and emotions often triggered his excitement. The creation of the dance drama "The Grand Hotel" is derived from this, and this drama is also the first self-written and self-directed work of Li Xing. The play was designed by Oscar winner Yangping Taneda, known as the "God of Film Art", and tom Weser, chief lighting engineer of the Dutch Dance Theatre (NDT), as the lighting designer, creating a large hotel close to the real in the theater, exploring the conflict between the individual and the individual, between the individual and the group in the spatial transformation of reality and non-reality.
In the play, the hotel manager and all kinds of tenants - professors, wives, lovers, pregnant women, drunks, maids, etc., wander in the hotel, looking for a place for the soul. They have men and women, angels and demons, and the emotion and helplessness they experience also allow the audience to see themselves in it. The main creative team deliberately weakened the story and sense of time, leaving the "people" in the space, and turning the frame stage into a multi-dimensional space. Everyone in the hotel staged a "Rashomon" style of human violence, telling an absurd and suspenseful story of "the truth you think is only what you think".
Healing light comedy "When She Dies"
Performance time: December 24, 2021 - January 15, 2022
Venue: Beijing Renyi Experimental Theater
"On Her Deathbed" is the masterpiece of the Russian playwright Putuskina, and although the title is slightly heavy, the play is a complete light comedy. The mother and the old girl who have never married for life are dependent on each other, and the mother feels that she will soon die, and her greatest wish is to see her daughter married and form her own happy family when she dies, if only she could hold her granddaughter. In order to realize her wishes, the old mother and daughter talked about life and love, and the daughter saw that her mother was still worried about her marriage at the end of her life, and her heart was complicated. On the eve of the New Year, the "son-in-law" and "granddaughter" suddenly appeared, and the world of mother and daughter suddenly became lively, and misunderstandings and farces followed...
In the version of this performance, the director also carried out a lot of localization of the script, starting from the language and character shaping, so that the presentation of the whole play is more in line with the viewing habits of Chinese audiences. The emotions generated by the people in the story in a short period of time transcend the traditional sense of family affection and love, but a kind of human care, showing the unconditional trust, kindness and mutual help between people.
Classic American absurd drama "The Story of the Zoo"
Performance time: January 22 - January 23
Venue: Future Theatre
The play "Zoo Story" is the famous work of the American playwright Edward Albi. Completed in 1958, the play entered broadway in 1960 and gained wide acclaim, and the script itself became a classic literary text. The story takes place on a bench on Central Avenue. One day, Jerry, a homeless man, wandered to Central Park and stumbled upon Peter, a middle-class publishing executive sitting on a bench reading. He went up to talk to Peter and tried everything he could to talk, but Peter was always very cold. Jerry talks about his experiences and deliberately annoys Peter and forces him to talk to himself, but all this fails...
Albi's work reconstructs the model of postwar American comedy—focusing on both the acting technique and the spicy lines. The name of the work is "The Story of the Zoo", in fact, in the play, the zoo does not appear as a real background, it is only a symbolic meaning: the whole society is a zoo that cannot be walked out, and people are separated from each other like animals and animals. The work profoundly reveals the absurdity of reality and the alienation of people in modern society. The embarrassment between Peter and Jerry is caused by the huge differences in the social classes in which they live, and when people are unable to communicate and reach understanding in normal ways, they take extreme measures, even towards conflict and destruction.