For musical theater lovers, perhaps the most helpless thing is that when you rack your brains to introduce your favorite play, the other party laughs and compliments you: "Do you know opera?" Elegant!"
Indeed, in terms of genre, musicals and operas are really difficult to distinguish: both have singing, both have plots, and many plays will have dance scenes (so the historic opera houses will have their own ballet companies). So even in a musical theater center like Broadway in New York, you can meet a large number of people who have just come out of the theater and think that they have watched opera for more than two hours. Brad Little, the male lead actor who came to Shanghai twice to perform "Phantom of the Theatre", told me about his being used as an opera singer in the United States.
In simple terms, the main differences between musicals and operas are:
In principle, the singing voice of the opera must be bel canto singing, while the musical can adopt various singing methods and styles from bel canto to popular, rock and even hip hop according to the needs of the character setting of the plot.
The appreciation of opera focuses on vocal music, the audience pays more attention to the level of singing of the actors, and the image and physical performance can be taken back.
So bloated people like Luciano Pavarotti and Renee Fleming can also play the young Prince of Persia and the terminally ill Traviata on stage. Musical theater is a theatrical performance, the audience accepts a full range of stage feelings, in addition to the level of singing, the actor's image and physical performance must conform to the role and plot setting, so the famous opera actress Kiri Te Kanawa (Although she recorded an album record for "West End Story", but because of age and image, she did not have the opportunity to play the young girl Maria.
Opera and musical theatre also have different origins, and the two art forms are only "similar". However, in the process of development, musicals and operas have also learned from each other, and many classic operas, in order to attract a new generation of audiences, have begun to learn the fashion style of musical theater in terms of stage costumes; The musical also borrows the story prototype from many famous operas.
Miss Saigon, one of the famous "Four Musicals," is a prime example. The story is based on Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly. However, the background of the story changed from Nagasaki, Japan, in the early 20th century to Saigon (present-day Ho Chi Minh City) in Vietnam more than 60 years later.
Madame Butterfly was originally a short story written by the author John Luther Long based on a rumor his sister had heard about it, combined with a French novel published in 1887, Madame Chrysanthemum. In the summer of 1900, Puccini saw the play "Madame Butterfly" based on Lang's novel in London, and was greatly moved, so he found the original book and adapted it, which made a masterpiece.
The origin of "Miss Saigon" is the French composer Claude-Michele Schonberg, who flipped through the pictorial newspaper in his spare time one day and was moved by one of the photos. He recalled: "Looking at the silent mother in the picture who was suppressed by grief, what I heard was the saddest cry on the earth; And the tears in the girl's eyes are the strongest voices to accuse all the wars that cause the death of their relatives. ”
Educated in classical music, Schoenberg immediately thought of "Madame Butterfly" and hit it off with his partner Alain Boublil. However, they did not simply move the story location to Vietnam and change the name of the character, but searched for many Vietnamese exiles and former American soldiers, and after a full investigation of the documents at that time, reshaped the story line of the characters.
Relatively speaking, the color of "Madame Butterfly" is relatively gray: the male protagonist, Pinkerton, a U.S. Navy officer, has not had any real feelings for Qiaoqiaosang from the beginning, but just wants to have a "wife" accompanying him in the days of stationing in Nagasaki, and once he returns to the United States, he marries Kate, the whole image of a "negative man". Therefore, the whole plot revolves around Qiao Qiaosang's obsession with Pinkerton, and there is no war background, and the main cause of the tragedy is the cultural and emotional conflict between the East and the West.
From now on, such a setting seems to be slightly thin, but in the early 20th century, Western countries and China, Japan and other representatives of the East Asian culture has just been in contact with a few decades, coupled with limited information circulation channels, many Oriental cultures for European and American people, is an unheard of thing, and the just-concluded Meiji Restoration Japan is also "breaking away from Asia and entering Europe", its own internal contradictions and conflicts are frequent, reported through the Western media, often regarded as "the destruction of human nature by the backward culture of the East", so it was deeply affected by the time" Puccini, influenced by the Verismo ideology, naturally creates based on the theme of "mysterious and tragic Oriental women", showing the tragic power of the character of Qiao Qiaosang.
The musical Miss Saigon is different, judging from the memories of Schoenberg and Bobley, because they prefer the theme of the fate of small people in the context of the big era, so the theme of the play is grander and more "epic"—the war machine ruthlessly destroys people's pursuit of love and happiness. So although it is still the tragic ending of the love affair between the American soldiers and the oriental girls, Chris and Kim in the musical are truly in love, not the wishful thinking of Qiaoqiaosan to Pinkerton, and Chris still wants to take Kim away from saigon that is about to be captured, return to the United States, and start their happy life. This is in line with the mainstream concept of American society at the beginning of the Vietnam War.
At the end of the play, although Jin also took the form of suicide, it was completely different from Qiao Qiaosang's suicide. Qiao Qiao Sang gave up the traditional Japanese Shinto belief in Order to grow old with Pinkerton from the United States, converted to Christianity, was regarded as a great rebel by his family, severed all kinship, and waited for three years to find that Pinkerton never truly loved himself, and even his own children would be taken away by Pinkerton and his wife, feeling completely desperate, helplessly dying to maintain his humble dignity as a woman.
Kim, on the other hand, when she learned that Chris and Ellen were reluctant to take their children because they could not leave their birth mothers, offered their lives to give their children a chance to live a good and happy life — at least in her eyes.
Therefore, in addition to the similarity in story structure, the difference between "Madame Butterfly" and "Miss Saigon" is still very obvious, and if it is not reminded, many viewers may not be able to directly link the two dramas. In contrast, the musical adaptation of another of Puccini's classic masterpieces has a more "intimate" relationship with the original.