The classic Chinese opera Butterfly’s Love is coming to Scranton. The award winning Shanghai Yue Opera will preform a traditional tragedy often compared to Romeo and Juliet at Marywood Universities’ Sette LaVerghetta Center for the Performing Arts this weekend. The opera is part of a preforming arts exchange organized by the US-China Cultural and Educational Foundation.
Fred David Romines, Director of Bands at Marywood and board member of the US-China CEF, is part of a combined Marywood effort to host the event as a gift to the community.
The opera is set over 1,500 years in the past during the Eastern Jin Dynasty and centers on Zhu Yingtai, an intelligent and beautiful woman who desires an education that at the time is only available to males. Driven to make something of herself, she disguises herself as a young man and becomes established as a great student.
Over the course of her studies she falls in love with her classmate Liang Shanbo, who is completely unaware that his dear friend Zhu could be anything other than his sworn brother.
“The rest of the story revolves around how is she going to break the news to this young man that she is actually a woman and she’s fallen in love with him. That’s where the tragic element begins,” Romines explains.
“This type of opera from southern China is a highly costumed, very elaborate, with lots of make up, and it was preformed by women only. So the troupe that is coming to Marywood is an all female cast.”
Unlike original Shakespearian plays that originally featured only males with young men portraying female characters, Shanghai Yue Opera is traditionally female only. In this case, Butterfy’s Love features a cast whose male characters will all be preformed by women. The actresses who are preforming in Scranton were brought together through auditions from all across China. According to Romines:
“They recruited the whole country to bring this all star cast together for the American tour. They are all specialists in this genre of opera. These ladies are all top tier performers”
The Shanghai Yue style is very unique compared to familiar western opera, the performance is culturally charged and features traditional instruments and costumes.
“I think that the audience will feel the most impressed with the costumes, which are very bright and colorful, the expressiveness that is achieved through this kind of make up.”
Romines said.
“There’s the graceful movement, the gestures that is so important in this, one of the things that is so important to this is the colorful style of singing. Its very elaborate, highly ornamented, and stylistic in nature.”
The singing, along with the rest of the opera strives to be an authentic representation of Chinese culture, and will be performed in Chinese supported by English subtitles.
“It’s all about cultural exchange and hoping that this will be the beginning of some fertile relationships between Marywood University and the entities that are represented in this project and China as well. “