Reviving ‘The Peony Pavilion’ With Modern Shading

SHANGHAI — In the final moments of a recent performance of “The Peony Pavilion” here, a large cicada dropped onto the outdoor stage and buzzed around on its back, threatening to invade the long silk robes of the two star performers. But after a few gasps from the audience, the bug flew back into the trees, and a beautiful new adaptation of a Kunqu opera masterpiece ended on a sultry summer night.

“That was close,” Zhang Jun, who plays the male lead, Liu Mengmei, said with a grimace shortly after the performance.
 
The production, presented in a Ming-style garden, is an hourlong condensed version of a 1598 opera by Tang Xianzu. The work was presented in all its 18-hour glory at the Lincoln Center Festival in 1999 in a lavish production by Chen Shi-Zheng, which later traveled the world.

The current show, with music by the Oscar-winning composer Tan Dun and choreography by Huang Doudou, one of China’s most celebrated dancers, is Shanghai’s version of Shakespeare in the Park. It is also the latest attempt to breathe new life into Kunqu, a colorful art form that is sustained by government financing but is in danger of disappearing in the wave of modernism now sweeping the nation.

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