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.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Taiwan’s drone exports are taking off, fuelled by the war in Ukraine, as Taiwanese companies seek a stake in the fast-growing global market for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Low-cost drones used for reconnaissance and strikes are in high demand as governments around the world boost defense spending in the face of intensifying conflicts. A relative new player in the increasingly competitive industry, Taiwan’s pitch is to be an “Asian hub” for the production of UAVs and components free of Chinese materials, or “non-red.” That means its UAVs can be up to three times more expensive than their Chinese competitors, like the world’s biggest
There are shadowy cabals plotting to sell out Taiwan to be annexed by China, by invasion if necessary. Fortunately, they are buffoons. In 2019, former Bamboo Union gangster and founder of the China Unification Promotion Party (CUPP), Chang An-le (張安樂, colorfully known as “White Wolf”), led a protest at the Legislative Yuan against comments made by then-premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) that in the event of an attack by China, he would never surrender, but would protect the nation by fighting to the end, even if he only had a broom. Chang had party members bring a wooden casket that they
RSS