Sichuan - part 2

Hi guys. Here's the next Sichuan entry. Yes, I know it has been a while but I've been awfully busy, thanks for understanding. =)

Okay, after dinner on the first day of our trip to Sichuan, we were scheduled to watch a musical called Jinsha (金沙) , click here for English version. According to the Sichuan guide Xiao Xin, the musical was staged in Singapore during the Huayi Festival in Singapore. The Huayi Festival (华艺节), the Chinese Festival of Arts, is usually held in Singapore sometime during the early part of the year and is an annual event celebrating Chinese theatre, dance, music and visual arts.

I've not watch a large-scale musical in a theatre since watching Mamma Mia! at the Esplanade in 2004, I think. Xiao Xin (in case you've forgotten, he was my Sichuan guide) said that when Jinsha was staged in Singapore, ticket prices were going for about SGD100, now I'm not sure if what he said is true but from the pictures that I saw of Jinsha in the brochure, this musical looked relatively ambitious and I was looking forward to watching it.



But what I certainly was not prepared for was the theatre culture in China. Now, that's not to say that theatre culture in Singapore is great. I still remember quite clearly an article in the papers about crying babies at a SSO performance and annoying ignorant Singaporeans complaining about not being let in after they arrived late... eh... where have they been? It's been like that for decades and I still remember running like some kind of desperado to try and make it on time 20 years ago at the Victoria Theatre. Anyway, rant aside, the thing I wasn't prepared for was that some people were smoking at the back of the theatre and I had to breathe through my handkerchief for a bit. And get this, after the first half hour, you're allowed to take photos and video of the performance. I actually found the popping flashes distracting and couldn't bring myself to shoot any photos during the performance of a musical that obviously has aspirations to be the Snow Wolf Lake of Hong Kong or Forbbiden City: Portrait of an Empress of Singapore.

The musical itself was quite ambitiously put together and featured several lighting and other special effects which was pleasantly surprising considering the fact that the theatre itself wasn't in tip-top shape and when I first sat down and took a look around the place, I actually felt it was a bit on the shabby side. That said, a lot of thought and effort did go into the visual effects and even though the theatre was on the small side, they managed to create the illusion of grandeur and the sense of the epic nature of this tale.

The music isn't really that great. At least it isn't of the standard of many of the great musicals in the world and not even as memorable as Snow Wolf Lake and Forbidden City which had several powerful signature tunes that stay with you even after the performance. I must say that a lot of effort was put in but unfortunately too many of the songs sounded too similar and felt like an uncomfortable fusion of Chinese pop and Western musical styles. The music isn't terrible but just lacked a little something that's all.

Where this musical does fail is in the story. The story is at once simple yet complicated. It is simple in the sense that it is really in essence the story of a love that transcends time. It is a story of thwarted love over many reincarnated life-times. The backdrop to this love story is the discovery of the Jinsha ruins in Sichuan and the travel back in time to show the audience the lost Kingdom of Sun and how the lovers are torn apart time and again, lifetime after lifetime, till our current time in history.



Unfortunately, what should have been a simple tale of love is complicated by the far too many reincarnated lives and after a while the audience is lost. I know I wasn't the only one going "huh?" when the female character keeps dying only to reappear in some vastly different setting that didn't seem more modern than the previous. If each reincarnation had seem more modern than the previous, I think the audience would have understood that it was a different life. But because each reincarnation was set in yet another fantasy-like world, it made it hard to figure out if it was indeed another lifetime, the same lifetime or just a dream.

It also didn't help that the most interesting characters in the musical aren't the two lovers Sha and Jin. It was the Jester that I liked the best and while Fish, Jin's maid I think, was under-developed, she had an interesting relationship with the Jester and that in turn gave her character just that little bit of depth.



However, that said, the producers of this lavish musical must be applauded for Jinsha has many things going for it and is certainly a good enough production to kick-start this form of theatre in China. And while I didn't think they were entirely successful in trying to fuse Western and Chinese styles in the music, the story-telling and the costume design, yet they did manage to achieve so much that I think that Jinsha will prove to be an important piece of work in the history of modern Chinese theatre.