The first Rock-Musical Monkey King

2/11/2009 1:47:23 PM 

Monkey King, Inspired by the famous mythological legend Journey to the West written in the 15th Century, the First Chinese Rock-Musical Monkey King ran at the Beijing Exhibition Theater from Aug. 9-17 during the Olympic Games period. Majority of the audiences loved it and a lot of them were family audiences. It used an unprecedented way of handling materials extracted from thousands of pages of a highly complex novel. Countless versions of this story have been put on screen, television and on stage throughout modern Chinese history, However, to create a two hour contemporary stage musical, the script of Monkey King has to be especially efficient in depicting elements that are most meaningful within the context of this fabulous and beloved tale, to make this story acceptable to international audiences of the twenty-first century, the director, Dennis Law, added more colorful characters to the journey of the heroes and put more emphasis on the more Taoist interpretation of the book provided by early Qing Dynasty(1644-1911)authors Wang Xiangxu and Huang Zhouxing, this explanation of the Taoist themes of yin and yang and the five elements of nature makes the tale easier to comprehend in more visual and meaningful terms for international audiences. This need for both alternation and abbreviation of the original story is precisely why Monkey King must be inspired by Journey to the West only and not as a show of Journey to the West. The end result of this adaptation is that this unique Rock-Musical unfolds in an entertaining setting of a surreal and visually spectacular for the universe in which the unreal becomes real.