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Eat forbidden fruit
Get a taste of Forbidden City, a musical on the life of Empress
Dowager Cixi, at the Esplanade - more popularly known as The
Durian - as part of its opening fest
By Clara Chow
AN ENGLISH musical based on the life of China's Empress Dowager
Cixi will be part of Esplanade - Theatres On The Bay's opening
festival in October.
Co-produced by the arts centre and the Singapore Repertory Theatre
(SRT), the two-hour-long show, Forbidden City: Portrait Of An
Empress, will hold its world premiere in the centre's 2,000-seat
theatre.
photo/Their previous collaborations have been a success so now
Dick Lee and Kit Chan are teaming up to tell the story of China's
Empress Dowager Cixi.
It features original music by homegrown composer Dick Lee, 45,
and stars Singapore pop singer Kit Chan, 29, as the empress.
The cast of 30 includes actors from Singapore, London and the
Philippines. Hawaiian actress Blossom Hoffman, 67, will play
Cixi in her old age.
The story is told from the point of view of an American painter,
Kate Carl (British actress Leigh McDonald), who visited the
Forbidden City at the turn of the last century to paint a portrait
of the empress.
The musical's creative team discovered Carl's memoirs in the British
Library last year.
The production traces the life of Cixi as an ambitious young concubine
to her last days as a weary old woman.
Her relationships with men are also explored: three emperors (her
husband, Xianfeng; son, Tongzhi and nephew, Guangxu), her head
eunuch, Li Lianying, and Western journalist George Morrison.
Initially titled Yehenara after Cixi's Manchurian clan name, the
musical was renamed because the present title is easier to pronounce
and encompasses more meanings, says SRT artistic director Gaurav
Kripalani.
INTEREST SPARKED
THE musical has been in development since the middle of last year,
although Lee came up with the idea as far back as six years ago.
Of its genesis, he recalls: ''All my life, as a seventh-generation
Peranakan Singaporean, I never felt Chinese. But when I went on
holiday to the Forbidden City in Beijing in 1995, something hit me.
That sparked my interest in Chinese history.''
Inspired by movies such as The Last Emperor and books on Cixi such
as Sterling Seagrave's 1993 biography, Dragon Lady, he teamed up
with London-based director Steven Dexter and British lyricist Stephen
Clark.
Their portrayal of the iron-fisted ruler will be a sympathetic one.
Lee says: ''A lot of things about her were invented. I felt they were
told almost like fairy tales.''
Instead of lush symphonic orchestras, the music for Forbidden City
will be a mix of synthesizers and Chinese traditional instruments.
The desired effect, he says, is a stylised, modern soundscape for 19
songs in as many scenes.
There will also be live accompaniment from four musicians playing the
erhu, guzheng, yangqin and percussion.
Likewise, the set will be a stylised construction of muslin screens
resembling 8-m-high steel cages.
This will take a couple of months to complete, says director Dexter,
40, who was behind the world premiere of the musical Honk!.
He has also directed four other SRT productions - They're Playing My
Song, with Adrian Pang and Lea Salonga; Little Shop Of Horrors; Sing
To The Dawn, which opened the 1996 Singapore Arts Festival; and A
Twist Of Fate, which also featured Lee's music.
Singapore designer Yang Derong will create the costumes.
SERENDIPITY
WHILE festival-opener Singapore Dance Theatre's Reminiscing The Moon,
will probably receive the lion's share of attention during the
Esplanade's opening, Forbidden City's world premiere will work
well within the opening festival, says the art centre's programming
director, Mr Geoff Street.
''The work is a major collaboration between Asian and Western
artistes. It represents one of the significant performance genres
- musicals - we will be presenting in the main theatre,'' he says.
Both SRT and SDT's works for the opening festival centre on Asian
women, which he describes as ''serendipity rather than by design''.
Other productions in the Esplanade's programming which have women
in key roles include Selena Tan's cabaret A Single Woman, and an
Indian piece in the Asian Contemporary Theatre Festival called
Nupi (''Woman'' in Manipuri).
While it is known that SDT's dance was commissioned by the Esplanade
for $700,000, both the art centre and SRT are keeping mum on the
budget of Forbidden City.
''This is a project we are considering as a potential commercial work,
so we are not discussing finances for the time being,'' says Mr Street.
SRT intends to tour the musical internationally, but details have yet
to be confirmed.
Rehearsals began a week ago and will continue for seven weeks.
Asked how he feels about his work having a world premiere at the
Esplanade, Lee says: ''I think expectations will be high. But I'm
very proud of the effort and thought that has gone into this work.
I'm going to enjoy every minute of it.''
Forbidden City: Portrait Of An Empress is on at the Esplanade -
Theatres On The Bay from Oct 17-19 at 8 pm. Ticket prices will be
announced on Thursday as sales for the Esplanade's Opening Festival
start that day from all Sistic outlets (Tel: 6348-5555). Or book
online from Thursday at www.esplanade.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EMPRESS KIT:
IT MIGHT be a case of art imitating life.
Singer Kit Chan, who plays Cixi, says her friends' nickname for her
is'Empress Dowager'.
When asked how similar she is to her role, she giggles and says her
hair and make-up team in Taiwan call her 'Empress Dowager'.
'I like to bully my hairdresser. I'll tell him to make sure I look
good, or else I say 'tuo chu qu zhan' (drag him outside for execution).
And he'll say 'yuan wang ah, tai hou' (I've been wronged, Empress Dowager).'
Chan was one of the first Singapore singers to make it big in the
Taiwanese Mandarin-pop market in the 1990s. Now based mostly in
Singapore, she will release her new Mandarin and English album in
September.
She recalls how she was recently mulling over how she could be part
of the Esplanade's opening when she ran into Dick Lee at Changi
airport and he told her that she was being considered for the lead.
They worked together in the well-received 1997 Jacky Cheung musical
Snow.Wolf.Lake.
Chan can now reel off facts about Cixi. 'Do you know it took 3,000
workers just to make her socks?' she asks. 'That's because each pair
had a different embroidery design.'
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
China's last empress
EMPRESS DOWAGER CIXI has gone down in history as an extravagant and
iron-fisted ruler.
The real Empress Dowager (above, centre), flanked by her court
attendants ruled China from 1861 until 1908.
She ruled China from 1861 to 1908, and popular lore has it that she
was served 150 different dishes at a single banquet, drank from jade
cups and ate with golden chopsticks.
Using funds meant for the navy, she rebuilt a lavish summer palace
in Beijing. Her jewellery vault was said to have held 3,000 ebony
boxes of her 'everyday' jewels.
Cixi was born in 1835 with the clan name Yehenara. Details of her
birth-place and childhood are vague. By some accounts, her father
was a captain in the Banner Corps which guarded the Forbidden City.
In other versions, she was the daughter of an ordinary Manchu official.
When she was 16, she was chosen as one of 100 concubines to serve
Emperor Xianfeng.
Her position in the palace was secured after she bore him an heir.
The Emperor's first wife, Cian, had no sons.
When her five-year-old son, Tongzhi, took the throne in 1861 after
Xianfeng died at age 30, Cixi ruled on his behalf. While her son sat
on the throne, she sat behind a bamboo screen set up behind him and
whispered instructions.
When her son died of smallpox - some say syphilis - in 1875 at the
age of 19 - her nephew, Guangxu, took over the throne.
A skinny, sickly youth, he was in favour of China learning from the
West. But these ideas were unpopular with Cixi.
In 1898, Guangxu initiated his Hundred Days of Reform. He issued
decrees ordering the building of railroads and called for military
and legal reforms.
Officials who opposed him were dismissed, earning him enemies among
the Manchu elite. When news broke of Guangxu's intention to strip
Cixi of her power, she replaced his palace guards with her own men
and placed him under house arrest.
A key event during her reign as regent was the Boxer Rebellion in
1900. It was started by a society called the 'Righteous and
Harmonious Fists', dubbed Boxers by the British because they
practised a kind of boxing which they thought made them
invulnerable to guns and knives.
They began killing foreigners in China whom they blamed for the
country's woes, burnt churches and murdered Christians.
In response, foreign troops including British, French, Germans,
Japanese and Russians marched into Beijing. Cixi ordered her army
to turn them back.
The allied forces seized Chinese coastal forts. Furious, Cixi
ordered all Westerners in China to be killed.
Eventually, on Aug 14, 1901, Beijing was captured by 19,000 allied
Western troops. Cixi fled north to the city of Xian. There, she
signed a humiliating settlement with the foreign invaders which
exacted heavy fines, unfair trade treaties and the right to station
foreign troops in China.
A year later, she returned to the Forbidden City and promised a
Constitution and representative government.
But it proved too late. The Qing dynasty, which began in 1644, was
already crumbling.
Seven years later at the age of 73, she suffered a stroke, then
dysentery. Dying, she named her grand-nephew Pu Yi as the successor
to the throne. He was to be the last emperor of China.
Cixi died in November 1908 at the age of 73 and was buried in Beijing,
her body covered in gems. Twenty years later, revolutionaries looted
her tomb and desecrated her body.
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作者: duffy (放手更自在) 看板: KITCHAN
標題: Re: [StraitsTimes]Eat forbidden fruit
時間: Wed Jul 31 12:43:18 2002
Forbidden City
是紫禁城的英文
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