Picking up your tickets
Psshh, you're thinking - just pick them up at the theatre's box office. Nope. Buy them online, then pick them up from any number of ticket outlets - just not the theatre because it won't have a box office.
Reading your english guide
With the opera being sung and spoken in Canto, I cannot understate the importance of picking up the English synopsis when you enter. It was difficult to follow even with those, so you will be at a loss for words if you don't have this or a local to translate for you.
There's a short paragraph for each of the acts, which isn't much when each act lasts around 40mins and you don't know which character is which. Therefore, it makes a brilliant mystery game for discussing what actually happened during the short intervals between the acts.
The Costumes
These are absolutely fantastic, and were probably my favourite part of the show. They are loud, extravagant and over-the-top. My favourite were the hats with two really long feathers coming out from each side, bobbing around and swaying around mesmerisingly each time they moved or talked. At first, it can be difficult to establish who is male and female as the make-up is the same, and the costumes can look quite similar but you get used to this and looking closely at the costumes you can normally begin to distinguish.
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| Totally going to be able to fend off the enemy with these costumes on... |
The Music
If you manage to nab a seat near the front, prepare for noise. The orchestra sit directly in front of the stage so if, like us, you're in the first few rows, and especially if you're towards the left of the stage then your ears are going to hurt from the cymbals pretty quickly as they tend to use them after each sentence. Two of our group were lucky enough to have brought ear plugs, but promptly (somehow) fell asleep with these in during the second act.
However, it's interesting to hear a Chinese Orchestra, and it's supposedly a bit softer, with more strings, than in Beijing Opera. Something I also noted was that their sheet music is not written in the traditional western way, but rather using gongche notation (i.e. using Chinese characters to mean notes) so it looks something like this:
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| I would love to learn to read music this way |
The Fighting
I must say, we chose a fun performance to watch - being centred around a warrior meant we got an act playing out a battle - this meant not only sword or bamboo-stick fighting each other, but soldiers doing flips and cartwheels, the kings wearing even more extravagant costumes and solo sword-playing.
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| One-handed cartwheels from a soldier |
The Story (Warning: Spoiler alert)
What did make me laugh was how an entire 40 minutes would be spent on slow, emotional scenes, such as the couple having a cup of tea in the back garden, with the warrior convincing his wife that her Father should join the war.
But the climax to the entire show lasted around 5 minutes in which a cloth letter written in blood is brought to the princess and she finds out that her 'Father' had actually killed her biological Father when she was a baby and pretended to be her Father, so was her enemy all along. Therefore she can forgive her husband for killing him as her 'Father' now means nothing to her. And they all lived happily ever after.
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| The star performers |
Despite the 3 1/2 hour long performance requiring a lot of energy to keep up with the plot and dealing with the loud cymbals, it was a fascinating show in which I loved seeing the beautiful costumes, together with the Chinese music, and having great fun deciphering who was who. I would highly recommend it for anyone with a little perseverance.
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