Musical director Dennis Law, in Toronto to promote his spectacle Monkey King.
Chinese traditional theatre has entered the era of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with flying acrobatics and highly choreographed martial arts and dance. But it wasn't being packaged for Western audiences, says Chinese-American theatre impresario Dennis Law. Enter Monkey King, based on the classical Chinese tale Journey to the West, an acrobatic musical which premiered last month in Vancouver.
During the Ming dynasty, when the original tale was written, characters didn't have Stratocaster guitars and leap around in Technicolor costumes. Welcome to the 21st-century version.
Monkey King's production company is Beijing based, but the troupe's intended audience is foreign. "The whole point is to make entertainment a lot more multicultural," said writer, producer and director Dennis Law. In doing so, the company Sight, Sounds & Action, which has been around for a decade, has created a kind of theatre spectacle which Law dubs "action-musicals.
"I was fascinated by the action potential of Chinese performing artists," Law says. "We chose to use action as the format for telling a story rather than focusing on dialogue or the use of song lyrics. Although our action-musicals have songs, movement, action and dance, we use projected titles [either above the stage or to the side]that tell what the song is about.
"In this production, we decided that because it's ambitious and we're using rock music as a base, we fused all these Chinese classical movement forms into one, to integrate them together. Integrated action," Law says.
Looking down the list of credits in the program, you'll see Law's name many times, followed by "MD" every time. Law was a chest and vascular surgeon in Denver, but gave it up to follow his love of theatre. He grew up in Hong Kong, but received his medical training in the U.S.
"I spent decades of my life as a surgeon supporting ballet and Western opera. And then I got a chance, over 10 years ago, to shoot a martial arts action movie distributed by MGM, Warriors of Virtue," Law says. He was a writer and producer for the 1997 film. But going to Asia got him thinking of the possibility of producing theatrical productions for the Western consumption, particularly highly acrobatic shows.
"Why I hadn't seen it in the West, [despite]being so familiar with Broadway and Vegas and all that, is because the artists there in China haven't had the kind of personnel that can package their content, so that it could be exported," Law says. "There are too many boring elements in between their fantastic elements."
Law's solution? He cut the dialogue and upped the action.
The action-musical is based on is one of the most familiar traditional tales in Chinese culture. Law likens it to The Lord of the Rings, but a better comparison could be Grimm's Fairy Tales in terms of general familiarity. In the Monkey King, a monk must make a pilgrimage to India. His companions include a fellow monk, a pig-like creature, a monkey person and a horse/dragon who battle with demons and fairies along the way.
The first interpretation of the book was Buddhist. But in the Qing dynasty, the book was given more of a Taoist bent. Law is leaning toward that interpretation for his musical.
"The Taoist [version]lends itself to interpreting everything in terms of the five elements of the Earth," which are wood, fire, earth, metal and water. "It really gives the story a lot more visual qualities."
Monkey King runs from Wednesday March 10 through March 28 at Toronto's Canon Theatre.