Sleeping Beauty has endured scores of theater, dance and animated adaptations and the Dafeng Musical Theater re-awakens the classic fairytale once again on the stage of the Sun-Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Taipei.
It's not the first time the theater troupe has performed the show in Taipei, but it could be their last. Dafeng script writer Lian Yi-chou (
PHOTO COURTESY OF DAFENG MUSICAL THEATER
"It's one of our most popular works and it's always fun to perform, but we also want to work on other projects," Lian said.
Recognized as the first successful ballet composed by Tchaikovsky,
Sleeping Beauty is likewise, the first script produced and written by Lian for the Dafeng theater company. It was while he sat watching the ballet rendition with his daughter that Lian was inspired to apply Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky's score to his own reworking of the story. The outcome was the theater troupe's premier performance in 2000, in Taipei.
"There are so many versions, ballet, storybooks and the Disney animation. Parents and their children are familiar with at least one of these. Even adults can feel like kids again when they watch it with their children. It's a perfect family show."
In his adaptation, Lian said he places more emphasis on the relationship between the beautiful princess and her mother. His story also concentrates on the heroic figure in the story and his transformation from a clumsy fool into a brave prince.
Following its 2000 premier, Sleeping Beauty was shelved and Dafeng moved on to perform other well-received productions including Butterfly Lovers and Merchant of Venice. A few years and several plays later, Lian revamped his original script and brought it back to Taipei, in January this year.
"After four years we [Dafeng Theater cast and crew] were more experienced in doing large shows and so we talked about doing our first production [Sleeping Beauty] again. But this time I wanted to make it more lively for the audience," Lian said.
Apart from a complete rewrite, additional changes included more animated choreography and a new score composed by Ran Tien-hao (冉天豪). The latest rendition uses the same script and music, however, because of the larger venue, it will be performed as a pantomime with lots of opportunity for audience participation.
The scenes might be different, but the actors are the same with renowned stage personality Wang Po-sen (
Lian said it is a show the whole family can enjoy. Interested parents , however, will have to act quickly, as tickets for all three performances are nearly sold out. At time of writing more than 75 percent of the tickets were sold out.
Performance notes:
What: Dafeng Musical Theater's mandarin production of Sleeping Beauty
When: Friday and Saturday at 7:30pm, with Saturday matinee at 2:30pm
Where: Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall
(
Tickets: NT$300 to NT$1,100 available at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall box office or online http://www.ticket.com.tw.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby