Saw the Romance of the Western Chamber last weekend at Kennedy Center while visiting my mom in DC. Strange to say, in spite of my opera fever, this was really the first full length Chinese opera I have seen live in a theater. Before that I have seen them as part of a mixed bill in theater, or on tv. So what appeared most forcefully to me, is ( Read more... )

Oh, has it really been more than a month?!

flemmings came down for a weekend a couple weeks ago, which was very nice, though a bit curtailed by her bad knee, (for which I'm probably to blame, since I tripped her while walking down 6th Ave. ;_;) But we did make it to the Met to see the very grand Yuan Dynasty exhibit, which is almost on the scale of the ( Read more... )

Li Yugang(李玉刚） is a very popular entertainer right now in China. While he is not exactly an classical Chinese opera singer who specialized in females roles, but rather a female impersonator in the Western sense, he somehow has managed to capture the imagination of the modern Chinese audience and to some degree resurrect the mystic of these actors ( Read more... )