The Butterfly Dream suffered from a somewhat uneven script, and where harsh juxtapositions of the classical and the contemporary often worked reasonably well in the rough-and-ready 108 Heroes (水滸108), which CLT premiered earlier this year, they were jarring in a show that required greater elegance and unity of composition. There was also little need for the bombastic score, which strained to produce a dramatic tension that simply wasn't in the script.
Overall, for all the beauty and skill that was present in the performance - something that needs to be emphasized amidst this flurry of criticism - the show suffered almost fatally from a lack of formal rigor in composition and for a facile sentimentality that fatally undermined its philosophical pretensions.
CLT must be applauded for including more than adequate subtitles in English for this show, a trend that we can only hope other groups will emulate as an important means of giving Taiwan's theatrical products greater accessibility for an international audience.
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