DOWNTOWN
NEWS
April
19, 2004
THEATER
REVIEW
By Rob Kendt
CONTRIBUTING
WRITER
The
emperor has no clothes--or rather, he's barefoot and wearing white jeans with
colorful print designs and a thrift-store jacket over a windbreaker.
Oh, never
mind. Just about all that can be said in favor of Peach Blossom Fan, the misbegotten new piece of
avant-garde music-theater mounted by Cal Arts' Center for New Theatre at REDCAT
in Disney Hall, is a litany of striking if pointless flourishes and fillips.
Such as: a spiral staircase lit from within whose steps resemble hot coals in
ice-block form; a cloth dragonfly the size of a hang glider tilting downward
from above, colored light pulsing down its length like a glow stick inside a
kite; a chorus of courtesans, dressed in '80s-vintage miniskirts, strumming
ukuleles while braying a nonsense song; a bona fide Chinese opera actor (Zhou
Long), incongruously alone amid a cast of Westerners, who wields a mean martial
arts staff; a bouncy, yodeling two-step for a snowy mountain scene, which is
among the few uptempo moments in Stephin Merritt's otherwise placid, tinkling
score; and, speaking of the music, there is the fragrant, lulling tremolo of Li
Chen's yangqin, a Chinese dulcimer.
I could
enumerate more such diversions and delights, but I'd be hard pressed to connect
any of them to each other, let alone to a larger point, a stylistic conceit--in
short, a theatrical idea. From what I can tell, hotshot director Chen Shi-Zheng doesn't have
one.
Or
rather, he has too many ideas, many of them not particularly good ones. For
instance: Cast a so-called opera entirely with non-singers, or, arguably worse,
poor singers; have a mostly Western cast in modern dress perform it in a
half-serious, half-halting movement style borrowed from Chinese opera; have
Long, the one actual Chinese opera performer, speak Mandarin amid the
English-speaking cast, and just play it straight, as if no one will notice;
slice and dice the original 17th-century epic so the narrative becomes plastic,
or, in lay terms, near impossible to follow.
Shi-Zheng
and librettist Edward Mast seem particularly interested in the character of
Yuen Da-Cheng (David Patrick Kelly), a corrupt playwright/impresario who barges
in on the courtship of Shiang-Jun (Ja'Nai Amey), a lovely, virginal courtesan,
and Hou Fang-Yu (Alan Loayza), a slick, fresh-faced poet, with a keening high
note and the fulsome gift of an emerald ring.
The
ring is spurned, and this is no small insult to Yuen, who is not a starving
artist but a state functionary with, according to one chorus member,
"death squads" at his beck and call. Sure enough, Yuen is later seen
plotting a palace coup with Ma Shi-Ying (Mary Lou Rosato), a "heroic
cavalier" with an eye on the prime minister's post. The childish emperor
they install (Matthew Steiner) is a grating brat with a screeching falsetto
that sounds like a cross between an off-pitch countertenor and Tom Hulce's
Amadeus.
It
is when Shiang-Jun, still pining for the now-exiled Hou, is forced to perform,
and put out, for the emperor that some of the show's thematic threads seem to
come together. This decadent Ming court, soon to be overrun by marauding
Manchus, is a self-contained instant-gratification empire whose official
artists, represented by Yuen, are only too happy to placate power. Those who,
like Shiang-Jun and Hou, remain pure, unmoved by authoritarian temptation, are
doomed to exile or death.
This,
I imagine, is meant as a critique of our own blissfully ignorant, satiated pop
culture, perpetually diverting our eyes from injustice, inhumanity and the
like. Early on, a trio of clients at the House of Madame Plum (Fran Bennett, in
a blue bob wig) make the point by blithely singing, "Watch the world
decay/And dance the night away."
The
question, naturally, is whether Peach Blossom Fan--with its tittering
chorus girls, stylized movement, lavish design, video effects, awkward stabs at
humor, and rarefied storytelling--does not itself represent a kind of
decadence.
Peach
Blossom Fan does have a few pluses. Though Merritt's score is almost
perversely diffident and badly sung, it has some distinctly lovely passages and
well-turned lyrics that are occasionally evocative and witty. As a retired
flunky, the striking Jon David Casey endows his weirdly formalized movements
with a kind of internal logic, and the diminutive Kelly has an assured, always
watchable presence. And the young chorus members are limber, enthusiastic good
sports all.
Finally,
there's something riveting about young Loayza's smug grin as the poet. It seems
to embody as well as anything onstage this endeavor's mysterious
self-satisfaction. It is a mystery he, and the show, keep resolutely to
themselves.