Live from San Francisco, Bright Sheng’s spacey Dream of the Red Chamber
Artfully assembled for the Golden Gate demographic, Dream of the Red Chamber highlights cultural differences even as it transcends them. On the one hand, the theme, and the high-profile creatives are all Asian, from the English-language librettist David Henry Hwang to the Oscar-winning designer Tim (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) Yip. Yet the medium is Western both in form and in its expressive techniques. Call it “fusion” if you will, but isn’t this beyond?Picture, for purposes of comparison, a Moby-Dick in Kyoto, enacted in fluent Japanese by Americans trained for lives onstage at the Noh.
To adapt a doorstop novel for the lyric stage, you need a big blue pencil. Tolstoy peoples the pages of War and Peace with a cast of more than 500. Prokofiev’s operatic epic retains an unheard-of 70 named parts. Bright Sheng’s Dream of the Red Chamber, drawn from a Chinese classic double the length of the Tolstoy, slashes Cao Xueqin’s slate of 400-plus characters to eight. The San Francisco premiere in 2016 took audiences by storm. Already it’s back, and this time viewers at home can catch it, too.