Chinatown Opera Theater in North America by Nancy Yunhwa Rao (review)

Many of the available English-language sources on traditional Chinese performance, as informative as they are, suffer from a need to generalize in order to encapsulate a phenomenon that has been centuries in the making, can be traced through multiple regional genealogies, and is active throughout the globe. Nancy Yunhwa Rao's relatively focused contribution to the field, restricted to Cantonese opera in North America in the decade of the 1920s, is therefore refreshing in its detail. Although the author carefully charts transnational connections with China and other points on the Pacific Rim, her study is primarily concerned with the flows of theatrical people and ideas within the area bounded by the United States, Canada, and Mexico, as well as the liminal locations of Hawaii and Cuba. Rao justifies the narrowness of her focus with convincing arguments regarding the uniqueness of the North American scene in the 1920s, which was characterized by unprecedented artistic experimentation during an era of explosive globalization (a situation that displayed all the contradictory signs of our present age—unbridled creativity alongside intense regulation of labor flows). By confining herself to this temporal and geographic range, Rao produces a work of deep archival detail and also of encyclopedic broadness, covering a full spectrum of topics including performers, touring networks, theatres, spaces, repertoire, performance conventions, advertising, and musical recordings. The intensity of Rao's focus produces a richly detailed picture of a key moment in the performance history of traditional Chinese performance, one that is immensely useful as a reference for experts in the field but also tremendously satisfying for the more casual reader who may have been frustrated in the past by the elusiveness of more generalized studies.

The encyclopedic quality of Rao's work is signaled by its division into five parts and twelve chapters. Rao lays out her subject and approach in the introduction, highlighting her intentional use of Chinese sources—important because many studies on the same topic have unfortunately had to rely on accounts written by non-Chinese. In part 1, the author situates performance in the 1920s within key historical contexts. She then turns to the subject of immigration policy and its effect on Cantonese opera performance in North America, setting up a key framework that she returns to throughout the work. Part 2 offers the reader a primer on "Performance Practice of the 1920s," which covers repertoire, acting conventions, and a sophisticated treatment of playbills, concluding with a case study of a representative aria from the era, one that will satisfy those seeking sophisticated musical analysis. In part 3, Rao traces the historical vector, beginning in Canada, that brought Cantonese opera back to prominence in San Francisco following a long hiatus after the 1906 earthquake. That movement culminated in the rise of the famed Great China Theater, which became a world center of Cantonese opera performance in the mid-1920s, thanks in no small part to a major labor strike in southern China during that period. With part 4, Rao chronicles the story of the Great China Theater's major American rival, the Mandarin Theater, emphasizing the latter troupe's influential promotion of female stars. With the final section, part 5, the author collects the extant sources on Cantonese opera in New York (including the story of the troupes that were the last to occupy the historic Bowery Theatre), Boston, Cuba, and Hawaii. In an epilogue, Rao considers the effect of the Golden Era she has documented on subsequent American art, including its impact on Chinese American novelists, the Chinese American film industry, and modernist composers, making a case for Cantonese opera as "an interlocutor of American music history" (320).

Rao bookends her study with a short but highly useful opening essay on Chinese naming conventions and an appendix of Chinese names and terms (the latter appearing in both Romanized and Chinese characters). The...