Love Wasabi (愛情哇沙米) is Spring Sun Performing Arts Troupe's (春禾劇團) most successful performance to date. When it was first put on stage in 2001 by the high-profile theater group, the 17 shows were quickly sold out. So popular was the song and dance piece that its director Liu Liang-zou (劉亮佐) adapted it for TV earlier this year.
The TV adaptation has just been nominated for four prizes including best director, best lead female and best supporting male in the annual Golden Bell Awards (金鐘獎). Liu's remake of the musical, to be performed tonight at the National Theater (國家戲劇院), will give comedy fans a chance to revisit the work that did brilliantly both at the box office and among the critics' circle.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SPRING SUN PERFORMING ARTS TROUPE
The person behind Spring Sun is its producer, leader, executive and actress Lang Tzu-yun (郎祖筠), one of the country's few top comedians. Having a way with smart words and a knack for touching the emotions of an urban audience, Lang's well known for her quick wit. A year after studying under Wu Chao-nan (吳兆南), an old master of Chinese stand-up comedy, Lang set up Spring Sun in 1999 with Buddha Says "Never talk about it." Teacher says "Say It Out Loud!", a series of traditional repertoire pieces with modern and feminist twists. Lang followed that up with several musicals and modern comedies, telling humorous yet touching stories from a female perspective.
Spring Sun's adaptation of Yuan dynasty drama in Huanhsi Mansion also drew full houses with ingenious stage settings and a hilarious plot. Last year's tragic-comic Spring Sun's 18 Tricks presented some humorous thoughts on life and love. What Sense Does Love Make? a musical performed earlier this year, is a tragic-comic look at love cross the Taiwan strait.
Despite the cast being almost the same in the remake of Love Wasabi, some details have been changed by Liu to give the story a more positive note.
"When I directed it for the first time, I was single and very pessimistic about the whole relationship and marriage thing, but this time I'm a married man. When I look back on the first Love Wasabi, I couldn't understand why I directed it that way, as I'm more positive about marriage now," Liu said.
He said he expected some of the audience who liked the TV rendition to go and see the theater remake.
"I wanted to do a combination of TV and theater. Hopefully a TV audience will enjoy the show as much as usual theater-goers."
Billed as "The Taipei Version of Sex and the City," Love Wasabi does have all the elements that makes it a TV hit, especially with an urban female audience: strong female bonding, lots of sex talks, debates on marriage and sexual preferences, hot love affairs and go go boy dancers.
Hsinli, Wang Chuan and A-lang were close friends since college. Their different life experiences over 10 years only strengthens their friendship. Whenever they get together, they help each other deal with their rapidly changing lives and their increasingly unhappy relationships with their husbands. Feeling wronged by their husbands, the three brood on revenge plans.
A-lang, whom everyone calls a superwoman, works on the management of a large entertainment company. Her husband is on the brink of a mid-life crisis and yet cannot stop chasing women. A-lang and her friends plot to teach him a lesson and rekindle the fire between them after years of estrangement, but this only leads to unexpected repercussions involving a willful young girl and an ambitious and amorous young man. At the same time, the other two friends, a marriage counselor whose own marriage is on the rocks and a actress past her prime, have their own problems to solve.
Another promising part of Love Wasabi is its soundtrack. Huang Yun-ling (黃韻玲), the veteran singer-songwriter, is well known for her pioneering bossa nova-tinged pop songs. Huang's fusion jazz compositions and melodic love songs make a nice background for the stories of relationships in the big city.
Love Wasabi is at 7:30pm tonight through Sunday and at
2:30pm tomorrow and Sunday at the National Theater. Tickets are from NT$500 to NT$1,800 and are available at Acer Ticketing Outlets. For more information, call Spring Sun at (02) 2395 2999.
Behind a car repair business on a nondescript Thai street are the cherished pets of a rising TikTok animal influencer: two lions and a 200-kilogram lion-tiger hybrid called “Big George.” Lion ownership is legal in Thailand, and Tharnuwarht Plengkemratch is an enthusiastic advocate, posting updates on his feline companions to nearly three million followers. “They’re playful and affectionate, just like dogs or cats,” he said from inside their cage complex at his home in the northern city of Chiang Mai. Thailand’s captive lion population has exploded in recent years, with nearly 500 registered in zoos, breeding farms, petting cafes and homes. Experts warn the
The unexpected collapse of the recall campaigns is being viewed through many lenses, most of them skewed and self-absorbed. The international media unsurprisingly focuses on what they perceive as the message that Taiwanese voters were sending in the failure of the mass recall, especially to China, the US and to friendly Western nations. This made some sense prior to early last month. One of the main arguments used by recall campaigners for recalling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers was that they were too pro-China, and by extension not to be trusted with defending the nation. Also by extension, that argument could be
Aug. 4 to Aug. 10 When Coca-Cola finally pushed its way into Taiwan’s market in 1968, it allegedly vowed to wipe out its major domestic rival Hey Song within five years. But Hey Song, which began as a manual operation in a family cow shed in 1925, had proven its resilience, surviving numerous setbacks — including the loss of autonomy and nearly all its assets due to the Japanese colonial government’s wartime economic policy. By the 1960s, Hey Song had risen to the top of Taiwan’s beverage industry. This success was driven not only by president Chang Wen-chi’s
Last week, on the heels of the recall election that turned out so badly for Taiwan, came the news that US President Donald Trump had blocked the transit of President William Lai (賴清德) through the US on his way to Latin America. A few days later the international media reported that in June a scheduled visit by Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) for high level meetings was canceled by the US after China’s President Xi Jinping (習近平) asked Trump to curb US engagement with Taiwan during a June phone call. The cancellation of Lai’s transit was a gaudy
RSS