Two vastly different musical experiences
Monday, September 22nd, 2008Beijing, China.
Friday night we went to see the Chinese Opera. I was really excited about it after hearing the old men sing at the park and really just hearing lots of random people singing around Beijing–on the street and in our hostel. But it wasn’t really what I expected. The costumes and make-up were really beautiful and the choreography was interesting and incredibly precise which was impressive, but the singing was horrible! I’m sure people like it. Obviously the Chinese like it or it wouldn’t have survived this long (one would hope). And we even met a girl in our hostel who really loves it. But to Steve, me, and (apparently) the rest of the audience it was like listening to some sad, desperate animal slowly die a very painful and drawn out death. It was awful!
The opera we saw was really three separate skits (which was a little disappointing on its own since there wasn’t one continuous storyline to follow like a play). I don’t know if this is standard or just what we got. The first skit started with a woman (a.k.a. dying animal) singing from offstage. There were two screens beside the stage with the Chinese characters and English translations of what she was saying. She had escaped a nunnery in order to find her love and live happily ever after. The whole skit was her trying to find a boat to catch up with her love; finding a boat and having trouble getting on; and rowing around looking for him. We never met the love or found out what happened with them. But the saving grace of this skit was the old man rower who was silly and antagonistic to the annoying escaped nun. Half hour later we changed to the second skit which was entirely just one woman in an elaborate outfit singing and twirling around. It was pretty boring and painful and the audience (which consisted mostly of Westerners and a couple handfuls of Indians) got audibly restless. About halfway through this half hour segment people started talking and not really trying to be quiet. I was embarassed for my fellow Westerners who were being so rude to the performers regardless if they (or we) were enjoying it or not.
The final skit started out well with four guys doing acrobatics and running around. And then from off stage we heard a woman’s voice and almost everyone in the theater very loudly sighed/cringed. It was awful but sort of funny that all these people from around the world had the same automatic reaction. Luckily this skit was slim on the singing and heavy on acrobatics, with the woman ‘fighting’ the four men in order to get a sacred herb to save her dying husband. She won, of course, in a crowd-pleasing show of juggling and flipping. It was nice that they ended with a big crowd pleaser since otherwise I think most people would have come away disgruntled. It was all-in-all pretty fun, even though we didn’t make it for our Peking duck feast beforehand since we were both stuffed from lunch!
montarsig