A Night at the Chinese Opera
Mar. 21st, 2006 01:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
example22Judith Weir's A Night at the Chinese Opera is currently on at the Royal Academy of Music. And by "currently", I mean "four performances, this week only". Apparently this is the first production in Britain since 1988, and I have no idea why it's been so long, since the work is a real crowd-pleaser. It's a contemporary opera based on a medieval Chinese tale, "The Chao Family Orphan", which has been adapted by westerners many times before. The title pretty much suggests the plot -- orphaned son avenges his parents -- but there's a play-within-a-play structure that makes the evening a bit less predictable than that would suggest.
Memorable tunes, understandable plot, sung well, with humour that is actually funny, in English you can understand without need for surtitles, and you don't need a second mortgage to buy a ticket -- what more could you want? Put another way: I may not know much about opera, but I know when I'm having fun.
Memorable tunes, understandable plot, sung well, with humour that is actually funny, in English you can understand without need for surtitles, and you don't need a second mortgage to buy a ticket -- what more could you want? Put another way: I may not know much about opera, but I know when I'm having fun.
