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.
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.
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