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.