|
Eat Forbidden Fruit Eat forbidden fruit 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.
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. 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.''
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.'
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. 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. Kit Chan's musical, Forbidden City will be held at the Esplanade on Oct 17-19. Tickets at $30-$120 are available from Sistic (call 348-5555) and www.sistic.com.sg (opens in new window) |
