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.
Exceptions to the rule are sometimes revealing. For a brief few years, there was an emerging ideological split between the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that appeared to be pushing the DPP in a direction that would be considered more liberal, and the KMT more conservative. In the previous column, “The KMT-DPP’s bureaucrat-led developmental state” (Dec. 11, page 12), we examined how Taiwan’s democratic system developed, and how both the two main parties largely accepted a similar consensus on how Taiwan should be run domestically and did not split along the left-right lines more familiar in
As I finally slid into the warm embrace of the hot, clifftop pool, it was a serene moment of reflection. The sound of the river reflected off the cave walls, the white of our camping lights reflected off the dark, shimmering surface of the water, and I reflected on how fortunate I was to be here. After all, the beautiful walk through narrow canyons that had brought us here had been inaccessible for five years — and will be again soon. The day had started at the Huisun Forest Area (惠蓀林場), at the end of Nantou County Route 80, north and east
Specialty sandwiches loaded with the contents of an entire charcuterie board, overflowing with sauces, creams and all manner of creative add-ons, is perhaps one of the biggest global food trends of this year. From London to New York, lines form down the block for mortadella, burrata, pistachio and more stuffed between slices of fresh sourdough, rye or focaccia. To try the trend in Taipei, Munchies Mafia is for sure the spot — could this be the best sandwich in town? Carlos from Spain and Sergio from Mexico opened this spot just seven months ago. The two met working in the
This month the government ordered a one-year block of Xiaohongshu (小紅書) or Rednote, a Chinese social media platform with more than 3 million users in Taiwan. The government pointed to widespread fraud activity on the platform, along with cybersecurity failures. Officials said that they had reached out to the company and asked it to change. However, they received no response. The pro-China parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), immediately swung into action, denouncing the ban as an attack on free speech. This “free speech” claim was then echoed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC),
RSS