Stan Lai (
Working with actresses Fang Fang (
PHOTOS COURTESY OF PERFORMANCE WORKSHOP THEATRE
Taipei Municipal Social Education Hall (城市舞台) has been packed to the ceiling for each of the shows in the first week and the sound of applause and laughter has been ringing around the theater.
A large part of the credit should go to actress Fang Fang, whose solid vocal performances and her versatility -- including opera-singing -- have re-established her as Taiwan's top female comedian.
The play begins with Betty (Hsiao Ai) and Annie (Teng Cheng-hui) hosting a gala event for a women's product firm called "Total Women." They wait for an old woman, reportedly a master of hsiang-sheng, a comedic art form that never had female practitioners.
The old women doesn't show up. She's dead, claims her granddaughter Funny (Fang Fang), who has come in her stead. The show must go on so Funny performs instead of her grandmother.
Scolding in the street, according to Lai, is Chinese women's equivalent of hsiang-sheng. When women cannot express themselves through the ancient art form of hsiang-sheng, they stand on the street and take aim, verbally, at everything in sight. Funny explains that her grandmother was a master street scolder and demonstrates her skills by chewing someone out.
Here the audience gets to enjoy Fang's spectacular acting, as she switches quickly from her role as a sharp-tongued woman to a little girl, from a weak-minded old lady to a male tricycle cabbie. But it is just the start of a series of excellent performances.
Later, Fang demonstrates more of her talents with the character Funny, recounting how grandma groomed her to have profound rhetorical skills, such as a stock market announcer, bus attendant, elevator operator and finally, waitress at a restaurant in Taipei where the bill is loudly accounted for in front of the customer. You would be amazed at how fast Fang can talk and add up the bill at the same time.
The characters of Hsiao Ai and Teng Cheng-hui principally respond to Fang's boasting or cliched words, but the two have their chance to shine.
In a piece called "Fat Pill" (
They imagine a fat pill is invented that makes one instantly obese. They imitate the cheesy rhetoric of diet food commercials and switch the negative words about fat into praise. For women who have had to watch their weight, this segment is most liberating.
For Lai, three women in a hsiang-sheng play is unique. Traditionally there are a pair of actors. But in Total Women, we see a diversity of women's images on stage.
Hsiao Ai represents the pretty but brainless woman; Teng portrays the kind-hearted but talkative woman; while Fang is the androgynous entertainer, who can be an old lady, a middle aged divorce woman and a naive girl. The diversity of images further enriches the comedy experience.
Total Women is a text and language heavy play that requires good Mandarin. But the classic jokes, which will be recorded on CD and DVD, deserve to be collected even by those struggling to learn the language.
Total Women is Stan Lai's first attempt at women's hsiang-sheng and it has modernized the traditional art by adding female voices. It's a show worth watching -- more than once.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In the aftermath of the 2020 general elections the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had crushed them in a second landslide in a row, with their presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) winning more votes than any in Taiwan’s history. The KMT did pick up three legislative seats, but the DPP retained an outright majority. To take responsibility for that catastrophic loss, as is customary, party chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) resigned. This would mark the end of an era of how the party operated and the beginning of a new effort at reform, first under