A couple musicals

Last night, Lindsay and I took in a couple shows at the Sai Wan Ho civic centre. This area of Hong Kong is quite a distance from our regular haunts, so it was interesting to go somewhere we hadn't been before. However, like much of Hong Kong, Sai Wan Ho is filled with high rise apartments and many stores. On the other hand it's more uniformly Chinese than a lot of other districts on the island.

Anyways, as you can gather from the pictures the plays we saw were called Can't Help It... My Feet Love to Dance and If Again. The first production was a revue of several songs from Broadway musicals of the past century. There was a loose plot which featured vignettes in between numbers with what I gather to be two aspiring stage actors from Hong Kong dreaming about being in different musicals. There was a guy dressed in a white and silver suit who seemed to be able to control their movements with the ring of a bell. It was hard to gather exactly what was happening in these vignettes because the actors spoke in Cantonese.

The show featured music from A Chorus Line, Grease, and Hairspray among others. My favourite piece was their second number "Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar" from Big Deal. It was just dancing, but they set a really good atmosphere with costumes and the music. The rest of the show was pretty good. The low moments came with the enactment of Summer Nights and Greased Lightnin'. The company had a number of guest artists singing the songs and their choice for the role of Danny Zuko was a young man who is the son of a popular musician from Hong Kong. According to the programme he has had a fairly active musical career, although I would assume that he has not had much experience in musical theatre. While Lindsay and I both felt the songs were severely butchered, the crowd seemed to eat it up. The girl in the role of Sandy did do a good job, as did the female backup singers, which only served to highlight the lacklustre performance of the boys' side. Adding to the mess was the fact that some of the words appeared to have been censored. Perhaps I don't understand Chinese attitudes towards censorship but I don't see why the guy playing Danny would have to say the words "passion wagon" while the guy playing Max Byalistock for "The King of Broadway" from The Producers would be quite able to say the f-word. Aside from the Grease songs, everything else was pretty good with only minor problems at the worst. It was definitely good music.

The second production was called If Again. Once again, due to the language barrier, we had no idea what was being said, although we got the general gist of things. The play was based on a poem called The Wild Party by Joseph Moncure March. For the most part, the story was told through dance, and as far as stories that can be told through dance go, it was a pretty good one. Basically, there is a couple who have a violent relationship who decide to throw a party. No sooner do the guests arrive then the hosts begin flirting with other people. The whole thing builds up until the male host starts fighting with the man upon whom his girlfriend has bestowed her affections. The fight ends with the host being stabbed and his antagonist being shot. The very last scene was well choreographed in that everything became completely chaotic.

Lindsay really wants to go get a movie now so I have to go. Bye for now.