Toned Opera
When a time-honored store meets Kunqu Opera
Situated along Liulichang Street, a hutong (alleyway) in downtown Beijing chock full of quaint shops selling antiques, calligraphy and painting tools, Rongbaozhai is definitely the biggest name among the stores.
Different from many other hutong areas with a hipster dazzle of tourists, this sector is a tranquil retreat from the crowds. With a history of more than 300 years, Rongbaozhai is the oldest store there and people’s first choice for buying painting and writing brushes, ink or paper. The displays and commodities in the store still show a glimpse of a glorious past.
Although the stories behind a few timehonored stores, such as the Tongrentang herb shop and the Quanjude roast duck restaurant, have been adapted to stage dramas and operas many times, the story of Rongbaozhai has remained elusive. That is until December 10, when a Kunqu Opera production adapted from the Rongbaozhai story was set to the stage at the Tianqiao Performing Art Center in Beijing.
No easy task
“Tongrentang and Quanjude are quite close to our daily lives and everybody is quite familiar with them, but Rongbaozhai is considered to be a place only for intellectuals,” Ling Jinyu, director of Rongbaozhai, told Beijing Review.
What ignited Ling’s imagination was a Peking Opera script featuring Rongbaozhai. Ling really liked it and recommended it to Yang Fengyi, President of the Northern Kunqu Opera Theater (Beikun), who also loved the script and immediately decided to adapt it to Kunqu play.
“Rongbaozhai has strong Beijing characteristics and it’s only natural for the audience to assume that whoever performs in this play will speak in a Beijing dialect,” Ling said. “But Kunqu Opera is a very different style.”
With a 600-year history, Kunqu, named after its birthplace in Kunshan of east China’s Jiangsu Province, is famous for its poetic and silky style. In 2001, Kunqu was proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. And in 2006, it was placed on China’s national intangible heritage list.
Compared to Peking Opera, the singing tune of Kunqu is much softer. How to combine the two contrasting styles was the biggest challenge for the crew. “All the advantages of the script turned out to be disadvantages when adapted into Kunqu,” Ling lamented.
It was also a hard nut to crack for the lyric writer Han Feng, who had never experimented with a Kunqu creation before and had to spend