"It's so funny! Really laugh from start to finish! ”
On the evening of July 6, after watching the burlesque play "Eight Feet in the Air", I walked out of the Wanping Theater and obviously felt the strong excitement and unfinished atmosphere in the air. More than half of the white-haired audience walked by, excitedly discussing the hilarious bridge section of the play and the face of an actor who had been seen on TELEVISION.
The performance was over, and the audience refused to leave for a long time, and the actors and works were hotly discussed at the entrance of the theater.
Throughout the performance, the reporter has been able to hear the unstoppable laughter from the audience before and after, and many people even have to deliberately suppress their voices so that their laughter will not affect others.
Since its premiere at the Shanghai Hongqiao Art Center in May this year, almost every performance of this work has been bombarded with high-density laughter, garnering applause and cheers from the audience.
The story told in "Eight Feet in the Air" is not complicated, it is the process of installing elevators in the old and small communities of Shanghai. Regarding the pros and cons of installing elevators, the subtle differences in the ideas of residents, and the meticulous persuasion work of the neighborhood committee and community cadres, in fact, it is not uncommon in previous media reports. Why is it that such a work of "life trivia" can arouse such a strong resonance with the audience?
I. Screenwriter ingeniously firing the "shotgun on the wall"
Wu Xing and Shao Ning, the script creators of "Eight Feet in the Air", are veteran media people in Shanghai's news industry, while the director of the play, Shen Gang, is a senior creator in the field of burlesque and TV sitcoms. Their long-term attention and accumulation to this subject determines that the first thing this work brings to the audience is a strong sense of "reality".
Installing an elevator, whether from the policy side or on the ground surface, should be a great thing. However, life is specific and complex, so many families in a building, will be because of economic conditions, housing prices, their own age and other dimensions, the installation of elevators or positive or negative views. In the midst of all kinds of strange things, nature has a lot to do, and the dramatic conflicts of the whole play, large and small, closely focus on this big proposition, unfold a character picture similar to "Seventy-Two Tenants".
The audience will naturally have a strong empathy for the residents who climb up and down without elevators, and at the same time have a lot of negative views about the roles that must be compared for their own interests. However, when Bao Liping, the biggest "opposition" in the whole building, lists the reasons for opposition from the perspectives of house prices, elevator operation noise, and inconvenience caused by construction, it is difficult for the audience to have a bad feeling for this superficially sharp-toothed "Little Aunt Shanghai" - her cruelty and brutality are just protecting her legitimate rights and interests.
Therefore, there are no absolute bad people in this work, all the characters are portrayed in a very three-dimensional way, and the plot development and character personality have established a relationship of mutual interaction and mutual promotion.
When the strange characters began a round of game around the installation of elevators, various small props and small foreshadowings became the "stroke of god" in the work.
According to Chekhov's "shotgun on the wall" theory, no prop on the stage of the play is superfluous, and may even become a key link in moving the plot forward. A small lottery ticket circulates in the hands of different characters, or the landlord and tenant are called "Aaron", which initially seems to be the "idle pen" of the playwright, but later reversed the situation, causing a strong dramatic conflict effect, and finally completing the arc of the character.
A small lottery ticket triggered the funny section of the brutal Bao Liping's "recognizing neighbors as fathers".
The sudden reversal of the blood-sprinkled characters common in some third-rate skits is completely invisible in "Eight Feet in the Air". From a staunch opponent to a participant who returns to the choice of the majority, this radical identity transformation is done naturally and smoothly in the work, without forced preaching, and the audience will not have a "jumping" feeling about the change of the character's position.
Second, the drama bone sits down to support the "laughing point" of Haipai
In addition to the solid drama, this work relies on a group of old drama bones with dramas, and presents the original Shanghai life in the most humorous way to the audience.
Zhou Laichun, played by Gong Renlong, is the most important character in the whole play. The 68-year-old actor walks like a fly on weekdays, but on the stage, the "good guy old week" he portrays is an old man in his eighties with inconvenient legs and feet, and Parkinson's disease. Throughout the performance, he has been shaking his right hand regularly until the end of the play, wang Wenli, the partner who plays his lover "Xiao Song", slapped his shaking hand off his chest, and he only jumped out of the setting of this role.
However, professionalism and the shaping of the body are just the basic kung fu of the old drama bones. He has a slight Shaoxing accent, a silly language style, and contracted a lot of laughs in the whole play; for many stupid things he did, the bad things done by others secretly complained, which can be called the "humanoid barrage machine" in the play.
Bao Liping, played by burlesque actor Xu Haili, is the biggest thorn in the play. On stage, she relies on a Shanghainese dialect full of small citizens to establish a strong image of a Shanghai aunt who is more interest-driven — a fierce role that seems to be everywhere in daily life. On the other hand, Xu Haili also showed her opera singing skills in the play, from "Doraemon" to "North Wind Blowing", which vividly reflected the ups and downs of Bao Liping's mood, and also made the audience laugh and applause. In the sense of the play, a forgivable villain is the most "brilliant", and the advancement of the whole plot of the play is also establishing such a character arc. However, to really play a three-dimensional role, it still requires the actor's solid kung fu.
An important auxiliary to the role of Bao Liping is Chen Xionggang, played by any of them. Chen Xionggang, who speaks Wu Nong's soft language, is neither male nor rigid in the play, and is a tough-looking wife-slave and a woman, which is completely the opposite of Bao Liping's personality. He does not play much in the play, but he is brilliant in every paragraph. The charm of this character is not limited to the traditional clown image of the girly; what is more interesting is that although he has no status at home and his arms are not able to reach his thighs, he has always had his own opinions in his heart. Every time Bao Liping's selfish actions develop to the point where she is about to touch the moral boundary, he will pluck up the courage and cower to criticize his wife, this design of "no one helps his own people" conveys the creator's value judgment without leaving a trace.
Chen Xionggang and Bao Liping are a pair of living treasures on the stage.
There is also a role worth mentioning, which is Hua Yi, who plays the secretary of the neighborhood committee. This "alley premier" has too many characteristics of good cadres at the grass-roots level in Shanghai. Grassroots work is complex and specific, and Hua Yi has a delicate skill: she can always resolve the sharp contradictions between residents; but in the face of work principles and bottom lines, she is never ambiguous. In the play, Huayi timely and accurately conveys and explains the relevant policies for the installation of elevators to residents, and will not deny and suppress the voices of these "opposition" such as Bao Liping in order to accelerate the installation of elevators.
Every day, Huayi has to deal with all kinds of strange events in the community that make people angry and funny.
When the conditions were not ripe, the persuasion work was appropriate, and at the same time, she did not miss any opportunity to help the "opposition" solve the difficulties in life, and disintegrated the "opponents" alliance one by one in a spring and rainy manner; when the policy was conducive to the "installation of the elevator faction", she did not ask Bao Liping to accept this result in a victorious posture, but knew the reason and moved her with affection, so that she finally took the initiative to sign the consent form.
On today's stage, the facial image is not easy for the audience to pay, and Huayi's soft and tough work style can't help but make most of the audience hope that in the community where they live, there can also be such a "lane premier" for everyone.
Throughout the play, the Haipai style of the actors is undoubtedly the most important trait. The so-called urban burlesque, the base is still the burlesque itself, Shanghainese, Suzhou dialect, Wuxi dialect, Chongming dialect, Northern Jiangsu dialect, the language laughter in various traditional burlesque plays, in this rather epochal play to survive, it is this group of actors of different ages on the stage, showing a neat language skills and performance standards, to turn a main theme story into a comedy of dense laughter bombing.
Third, the ingenuity of the dance to achieve the new Haipai comedy
This work is full of new words. Whether it is from the technique of the play to the performance of the actors, because it strictly follows the rules of stage creation, it shows the "mido" or sense of high-level that a good work should have. In fact, a small-cost work can not only rely on the play and performance to play a weightless miracle effect, the ingenuity of the stage design, but also make up for the "stretching" that a small-cost work may have.
When you enter the theater, the first thing you see is the huge rotating mechanism on the stage. The exquisite design of the structure effectively improves the efficiency of the transition of the stage space. On the periphery of this organ, the staircase structure of the residential building is represented, and after the mechanism rotates, the interior obscured by the wall is exposed, showing the scene of each household.
After walking up the stairs, the actors rotate through the wall, quickly return to the ground in the part where the audience's vision is obscured, enter the indoor scene to continue the performance, and can achieve scene conversion without the help of light dimming. At the same time, the wall of this organ itself is also a projection curtain wall, through a large number of projections, to achieve the performance of various painting style space.
A few simple pieces of furniture, coupled with projection effects, can instantly change a completely different home decoration style on the stage.
The reporter learned from the troupe that in order to complete the perfect projection effect on this complex organ, the stage design went through 18 drafts of revisions before and after, almost driving the art design crazy. In terms of the final result, the projection and lighting are very organically integrated to achieve a very harmonious visual effect. Today, when the big dance and expensive LED screens are widely popular, it is gratifying to complete a relatively lightweight, exquisite and foreign stage design with ingenuity and ingenuity.
In contrast to the exploding word of mouth, "Eight Feet in the Air" is not a hit. Since its premiere in May this year, "Eight Feet in the Air" has amazed the industry, and many industry leaders have even paid for it themselves and watched it repeatedly; major mainstream media and self-media have also carried out positive publicity reports. However, the limited box office revenue has made it still in a state of losing money.
The reasons for this are probably manifold.
First of all, the drama's publicity ability is constrained by capital. As a work with a relatively limited budget, the creator devotes almost all of his time, energy and expenses to polishing the work, and has no spare funds for channel promotion and publicity. In fact, the high cost of publicity channels is a difficult dilemma that many high-quality small dramas often encounter at present.
Another point is that although the actors in this work are very good, none of them are big stars who "bring their own traffic". In today's performing arts market, no matter how big or small the works, there is no star who "brings its own traffic", there is no blessing of "fresh meat and small flowers", and losing money is almost a high probability result. However, a healthy performing arts market, whether it is the work to achieve actors, or actors to achieve works, this is an old topic that the industry has repeatedly called for, and it is difficult to see improvement so far.
The famous commentator Luo Wenlian brilliantly played a kind and simple Suzhou aunt in the play.
Another point is the decline of traditional dialects. As a city with a wide range of rivers, Shanghai's gradual decline in shanghai seems to have a certain inevitability. However, in the midst of all the rivers, the excellent cultural products accumulated by traditional dialects should still be preserved. Most audiences in Shanghai can watch subtitles to enjoy Musicals in English, German and French, and can accept various avant-garde and niche stage dramas, but most of them are willing to enter the theater and pay money to watch a burlesque play, most of them are still native silver-haired people.
Perhaps "Eight Feet in the Air" is close to the lives of the people and easy to resonate with the audience, such a good Shanghainese work, but also needs more, so that more people can feel the charm of Shanghainese, and harvest laughter and tears in the theater.
Column Editor-in-Chief: Zhang Disi Text Editor: Zhang Disi
Source: Author: Dong Tianye