| Highlight | |
 | Performance Workshop's (表演工作坊) newest play, Like Shadows (如影隨形), was a huge hit with audiences when it opened last Friday night. The 150-minute play, written and directed by Stan Lai (賴聲川), is billed as a detective story and follows the life of a young girl who comes to terms with her family's bizarre past. The story, with its mixture of pathos and humor, kept audiences laughing and crying in their seats. Living up to his reputation as one of Taiwan's top theater impresarios, Lai created a visual feast that included dazzling lighting and a set that mimics the tempo of the detective story genre. Designed by Hu En-wei (胡恩威), the set features two large white walls that move to stage left and right. Moving the walls unveils new scenes and gradually reveals the family's mysterious past until the last movement when the different strands of the play are brought together in a denouement that any chief of police would find satisfying. ▲National Theater, Taipei City ▲Today, tomorrow and Sunday at 7:30pm; special New Years Eve performance at 9pm ▲Tickets are NT$500 to NT$3,000 and are available through NTCH ticketing or online at www.artsticket.com.tw |
Theater
Renowned French stage director Ariane Mnouchkine and her 60-member troupe, Theater du Soleil, will perform Theatre du Soleil Les Ephemeres, a six-and-a-half-hour show in French with Chinese subtitles on a revolving stage under a huge canopy with 600 seats. The canopy, brought in from France, is being set up in the plaza between the National Theater and the National Concert Hall. Les Ephemeres, described by critics as an elegy to the ephemeral quality of human existence, has two parts, each lasting 3 hours and 15 minutes. The show consists of 50 personal stories that work like small threads woven together into a fabric of love, friendship, conflict and farewells in communal life.
▲Plaza between the National Theater and National Concert Hall
▲ Tomorrow at 7:30pm
▲Tickets are NT$1,800 and are available through NTCH ticketing or online at www.artsticket.com.tw
Long-term Taipei residents often remember with fondness the exotic China Plaza (中華商場) before it was torn down in the 1980s. The market has now become part of the setting for Ping Fong Acting Troupe's (屏風表演班) play Apocalypse of Beijing Theater (京戲啟傺). The work combines writer/director Hugh Lee's (李國修) childhood experiences with the market as a backdrop, his relationship with his father and the day-to-day reality of running a theater group. Li's father was a famous haberdasher for Beijing opera companies, which allowed the writer free rein to explore the operatic tradition throughout the 20th century.
▲Taipei Cultural Center (台北市立社教館), 25, Bade Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市八德路三段25號)
▲Today, tomorrow and Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30pm; tomorrow and Sunday at 2:30pm; special New Year's Eve (Monday) performance at 9pm
▲Tickets are NT$500 to NT$2,500, except Wednesday night, NT$1,200 to NT$2,500. Tickets are available through NTCH ticketing or online at www.artsticket.com.tw
P.I.G. by Morning Star Theater (晨星劇團) tells the story of how the inhabitants of a quiet village in the middle of a forest encounter a natural disaster and manage to pull through by pooling their resources.
▲Chungli Arts Center (中壢藝術館音樂廳), 16 Chungmei Rd, Chungli City (中壢市中美路16號)
RSS