Features
Dreaming In English
China premiered its first homegrown English-language stage musical last week in Beijing. “Da Meng Shen Hou” (Big Dream Magical Monkey) opened with a tall, tattoo-covered American in the lead role.
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Based on a story that every Chinese person learns as a child, the production will leaven its local flavor with ingredients that would make it palatable to a Broadway audience, including hip-hop dance routines, gospel-flavored music, and a love story.
On the Chinese side it also features kung-fu fighting, acrobats and Chinese instruments.
The lead character of the Monkey King has supernatural powers and often battles other powerful beings.
The current production represents the first seven chapters of the epic “Journey to the West,” which runs to some 100 chapters.
The main theme of the story is the lead character’s evolution from “spoiled child” to “maturity,” though this version will mostly concentrate on the character falling in love, which did not occur in the original.
The show’s producer and director, Tony Stimac, is a Broadway veteran who brought the American musical “The Joker’s Game” to China in 2011.
That show was set in China’s Tang dynasty and featured magic tricks and “star-crossed” lovers, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Monkey King musical was written and choreographed by a non-Chinese team of professionals, in English and then translated into Chinese, though Apollo Levine, who is currently playing the lead, speaks only in English on stage.
Since Levine looks nothing like a Chinese person, Stimac felt the production should be developed around him. For the time being, the production is only slated for China.