In the past, I wrote a post on the mystery novels of Marty Chan. Chan is not only a novelist, but also a playwright. Last year marked the debut of Chan’s play The Forbidden Phoenix at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton. The play is about the Monkey King and is performed in a cultural fusion of dramatic styles — namely Western musical theatre and Peking opera. Billed also as a martial arts musical, the play is colorful and acrobatic, full of lively action with much singing and dancing. I had the opportunity to see the play with my daughter for the first time at the Manitoba Theatre for Young People this past week and thoroughly enjoyed it.
As Chan mentions in the video on the Citadel Theatre site, the play was inspired by some research he did of the stories of the ‘bachelor men’ — single Chinese men who had come to Canada to work on the railroad but who were unable to bring over their families because of the nefarious head tax put only on the Chinese by the Canadian government to prevent their immigration to the country. Re-envisioning the story as that of the Monkey King’s, Chan has his principal character banished to the west by the Empress Dowager to a place called Terminal City where he must unleash the Iron Dragon from the mountain at the behest of railway magnate and tyrant Horne. While attempting to do this, he meets the Phoenix who enlightens the Monkey King on Horne’s real intentions and soon the two become fast friends, and enemies of the exploitative Horne.
Although it was hard to catch everything in this action-packed play, there were some touches I enjoyed like the parodying of Cultural Revolution-era China with the reciting of the Empress Dowager’s Three Laws, and the dance of the Iron Dragon whose head resembled the front of a steam locomotive with wispy trails of metallic steam coming off its face like dragon whiskers.
If you ever get a chance to see this play, I’d certainly recommend it highly.
(Steve Hickey)
Stories come alive for us in many ways and children’s theatre is one of them. When I was a child, there was very little in the way of theatre for kids. That has changed; today there are a number of theatres that cater exclusively to children. To its credit, even my small city of Winnipeg has its own theatre for children — Manitoba Theatre for Young People – that has put on outstanding productions for children of various ages.
When I went to London this spring, I was intent on giving my children theatre experiences to remember. Of course, there is no city like London to see live theatre, and the children’s theatre there did not disappoint. In particular, my husband and I wanted our children to see work by Shakespeare and luckily for us, the Unicorn Theatre was staging Twelfth Night at the time of our visit. Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s more accessible plays for children. I read a child-friendly version of the play to my daughter the night before our departure, and it was surprising what she remembered when she saw the production. When the black-clad Olivia first appears onstage, strewing petals into the water, my daughter immediately piped up “She’s sad because her brother died.”
The Puppet Barge is a theatre on a canal boat moored in northwest London. The theatre uses marionettes. They had a production based on poems from Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic — A Child’s Garden of Verse. Using a delightful combination of marionettes, shadow puppets, and even a puppet show-within-a-show of Punch and Judy, the poems came alive through the performance.
What struck me about theatre in London was its multicultural hue. Shakespeare is acted by players of every race and color, and the marionettes displayed on the Puppet Barge came from all over the world. After all, to quote from Hamlet, the play’s the thing! And ‘play’ is certainly something children know all about! Is there some place in your city where your children can see live theatre? Do tell!
