Li Bao-chun (right) and Sun Zhengyang in Fifteen Strings of Copper Coins, rehearsed in the National Center for the Performing Arts.
Of her many trips across the Taiwan Strait, Vivien Ku remembers most vividly her visit to the Chinese mainland in the early 1990s.
She was then a member of the Taipei-based Koo Foundation's team for the promotion of Peking Opera. She recalls arriving in Shanghai after several air and rail transfers, to borrow the Fifteen Strings of Copper Coins (Shiwu Guan) from the Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe.
The opera classic was adapted from a Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) drama and debuted in the 1950s. It was hailed as being instrumental in reviving Kunqu Opera. The script with the Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe was the only one available then.
"It was almost worn-out and its characters were hard to recognize. We couldn't even make a copy," Ku says. Back in her Taipei office, Ku and her team had to put each page under the lights, and decipher them word by word.
The play was then readapted into a Peking Opera by Ku and the maestro Li Bao-chun, creating a sensation in Taipei in 1994. It later became a popular repertoire of the Koo Foundation-sponsored Li-yuan Peking Opera Theater.
The theater is now in town to perform at the prestigious National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA). It will stage Fifteen Strings of Copper Coins and four other pieces of "Readapted Opera Classics (Xin Lao Xi)". The three-day performance, which ends tomorrow, is part of NCPA's Olympic Performing Season.
Opera lovers will find that, compared to the Kunqu original, the Peking Opera version of Shiwu Guan is more tightly knit. It incorporates a variety of tunes and also features a provocative duel between wit and greed, says Ku.
Another highlight is the combination of Cao Cao Coerce Royalties (Xiaoyaojin) and Raid the Enemy Camp (Jie Weiying), two pieces of the opera, based on the Three Kingdoms (220-265 AD) period. Li Bao-chun, whose grandfather is esteemed opera actor Li Guichun, takes the lead role in Xiaoyaojin. He will play a tragic warlord in the first play and a heroic general in the second.
Coming from a family of Peking Opera masters in Beijing, Li Bao-chun specializes in lao sheng (the old male role) and wu sheng (the male martial arts expert). He founded the Li-yuan Theater in 1997 and has since dedicated himself to the "Readapted Opera Classics". The theater has been performing every year in Beijing since 2005.
