Lu Wei is the scriptwriter for internationally acclaimed film Farewell My Concubine.
Announced by the well-known American musical composer Jason Robert Brown via Twitter, a new musical project adapted from the classic Chinese movie Farewell My Concubine is now in the casting process. It means the 1993 film will have a new Western theatrical interpretation.
The film by famous Chinese director Chen Kaige was adapted from the novel by Lilian Lee and starred Leslie Cheung and Gong Li. It explored the subject of identity and followed the lives of two Beijing Opera actors, Cheng Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou.
The film was a representative of China’s Fifth Generation cinema movement, and was the first Chinese-language film to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993, helping to bring modern Chinese cinema to the international stage.
The new musical project held its open call in January earlier this year. Besides revealing its chief creators such as Kenneth Lin, an award-winning American playwright who participated in the Star Trek: Discovery film, the new musical project also released its casting plan in October. It requires actors who have “trained for a lifetime and mastered a difficult art.”
Brown’s tweet about the Western musical version of Farewell My Concubine inspired fans in China to join the discussion on the topic on China’s Twitter-like Sina Weibo.
Some of them expressed conservative attitudes. “It's like staging The Shawshank Redemption in Beijing Opera,” one said, while another said that “classics are hard to replicate.”
“In Farewell My Concubine, Beijing Opera is not a background, but a symbolic element embodying the Chinese cultural essence. If you want to make a Broadway-style musical without showing the charm of Peking Opera, you will lose the biggest part of this work,” Chinese film and cultural critic Shi Wenxue said to the Global Times on Monday.