Peeling back the skin of sad love affairs

• Source: Global Times
• [09:35 August 02 2010]
• Comments

The cast and musicians of Meng Jinghui's new show Three Oranges' Love. Photo: Courtesy of Wang Hao

By Guo Song

Meng Jinghui is one of the most influential directors of China's avant-garde theater and he is bringing three rather special oranges to Shanghai as his latest offering - oranges that have music and the bittersweetness of love and unrequited passion.

From August 4 to 22, Three Oranges' Love, Meng's latest musical, will be staged at the Shanghai Drama Art Center.

In this work the director recounts love stories from three different times and places. He wants his audiences to think about their own lost loves and to feel again the pain hidden deep inside their hearts.

The story is adapted from a 1761 Italian play by Carlo Gozzi. "A prince comes across three oranges, inside each lives a girl, and each girl has a different way of life," said Zhang Weiwei, one of the two composers of the musical. The story was also turned into a famous opera by Prokofiev in 1919.

"The three oranges here signify love, a person, a relationship or a moment of passion," said Meng, who is famous for his innovative, dashing style of direction.

One of the highlights of Three Oranges' Love is the music. The two composers, Zhang Weiwei and Guo Long, are independent musicians who worked in 2008 with Meng on his well-received drama Rhinoceros in Love, and whose music is influenced by Russian, East European and Bohemian styles.

"All of Meng's favorite poets are from East Europe or South America, and the story that is told in the second act of the musical is adapted from the Russian short story, White Nights, by Dostoevsky," Zhang said. White Nights tells of a man who imagines an entire life outside his reality.

In the musical the story is set in 1930s China and centers on an actress who has a passionate encounter with a man who has been commissioned to assassinate a leading figure the following day.

"Meng cried when he first heard The Killer, the key song in the second act, in rehearsal," said Guo, the other composer.

"Both of us have sins and no God can save us," the actress laments at the end of the act. The flavor of Eastern Europe and Russia is underscored by the use of an accordion which accompanies the folk music styles throughout the musical.

The director and his team have deliberately adopted a non-Broadway approach to this production.

"Musicals focus on the harmony between the music and the performers," Meng said. "This time I wanted to have first-rate live music without an orchestra."

"We mix the story, the performers and the music together," Zhang said.

And so, on the stage, as the show progresses, the actors and actresses take it in turns to become musicians, accompanying each other. All the cast appeared in Meng's recent production of Rhinoceros in Love.

"These actors and actresses are brilliant - they learned to play the instruments within a month," said Guo.

"They love music and practice very hard," composer Zhang said.

The soundtrack of the musical will be included in the composers' second album. Both have focused on folk music for more than 10 years.