"After watching 'Cuckoo Mountain', no one will forget the role of Ke Xiang, and it is difficult to forget." Shi Yihong, a famous Peking opera actor and Meipai of the Shanghai Peking Opera House, told reporters. Starring Shi Yihong, the Shanghai Peking Opera House version of "Rhododendron Mountain" will be unveiled in the 12th "Oriental Famous Drama Month" on April 25. In between busy rehearsals, Shi Yihong was interviewed by reporters and told about the red classic in her eyes.
"Sassy, handsome, calm, courageous and strategic." Referring to the heroine of the play, "Ke Xiang", Shi Yihong thought of these words without thinking. The story of "Rhododendron Mountain" takes place in 1927, when the peasant hero Lei Gang was affected by the autumn harvest riots and led the local farmers to rise up and go up the Rhododendron Mountain. Without the leadership of the Communist Party, Lei Gang and others failed three times in a row. After the party learned about it, it sent a representative, Ke Xiang, to come and was unfortunately arrested. After hearing the news, Lei Gang led the crowd to rob the law field and snatched the representative back to the mountain. After Ke Xiang went up the mountain, in the face of the bloody lessons, Lei Gang clearly recognized his failures and mistakes, personally killed the traitor Wen Qijiu, eliminated the local landlord forces, and led the troops with Ke Xiang to jinggangshan, the holy land of revolution.
In the early 1960s, the famous dramatist and literary scholar Wang Shuyuan released the script "Cuckoo Mountain", which he had devoted several years of painstaking efforts to ten times, and soon after it became popular on the drama stage, deriving the Peking Opera version and the commentary version. In 1964, at the National Peking Opera Modern Opera Observation and Performance Conference, two versions of Peking Opera "Cuckoo Mountain" appeared at the same time, which was rumored to be a beautiful talk, giving birth to the film version that later entered thousands of households.
Shi Yihong's relationship with "Rhododendron Mountain" began in 2001, and a full 20 years have passed since this year. In her words, this is a work that is not often performed, but each performance can always arouse the applause of a large number of theater fans, and the reason is its strong dramatic tension and tight choreography. "All the contradictions and pressures of the play are pushed to a person, peeling off the psychology of the protagonist layer by layer, so that Ke Xiang's image stands on the stage in three dimensions," Shi Yihong told reporters: "From the text, singing, to the stage scene, this play fully meets the standards of drama, Western music and traditional music are not two skins, which is not possible for many new dramas at present." ”
For the performance at the end of this month, Shi Yihong began rehearsal early, "Hearing that "Cuckoo Mountain" is going to be rehearsed, the cast and crew in front of and behind the stage are inevitably a little nervous, it puts forward high requirements for body shape and singing, not because it is the story of that era, just to learn a shape, but to really enter the heart of the character, otherwise the audience can see the difference at a glance. ”
Author: Wang Xiaoli
Image: Courtesy of the organizer
Editor: Chen Xihan