Two Decades of Selling Peking Opera White Snakes to Foreigners: From Tourist Peking Opera in Beijing (1996) to Zhang Huoding at Lincoln Center (2015)

PERFORMANCE REVIEW: TWO DECADES OF SELLING PEKING OPERA WHITE SNAKES TO FOREIGNERS: FROM TOURIST PEKING OPERA IN BEIJING (1996) TO ZHANG HUODING AT LINCOLN CENTER (2015) DAVID L. ROLSTON University of Michigan After ten years of Model Peking Opera (yangban xi 樣板戲), Chinese audiences, especially residents of Beijing, were euphoric to see the return of “traditional” (chuantong 傳統) Jingju 京劇 plays to the stage.1 But that euphoria only lasted for a limited number of years, and Peking opera2 in Beijing had to turn to a new audience to bring in money: foreign3 tourists. This rather unusual performance review will look at two performances at either ends of two decades to investigate what changes were made to Peking opera to make it more palatable to this new audience , and to speculate, if ever so briefly, on whether the contrasts between the two productions give us reasons for pessimism or optimism, whether from the point of view of the health of Peking opera, or the education/enlightenment of foreigners. Both productions shared the same name in English: Legend of the White Snake, even if their Chinese names were slightly different, as we will see below. They share the same heroine, Bai Suzhen 白素貞, a white snake who was able to take on human shape through dint of thousands of years of self-cultivation and to get a young man, Xu Xian 許仙, to fall in love with her and marry her in quite a jiffy. She eventually gives birth to a son for him before she is stuck under a pagoda by a meddlesome monk, Fahai 法海, who does not believe in inter-species marriage. Women have been associated with snakes in the West in the Bible and The Lamia, but those snakes never became as domesticated as Bai Suzhen, nor 1 My first visit to Beijing was in 1982. I had to buy tickets several days in advance to be sure of their not being sold out on me, and when that strategy did not work on one occasion, I went to the theater the night of the performance anyway and after being told to my face that there were indeed no tickets left, went to stand outside the theater to compete with numerous locals to try to buy a ticket from a scalper or whoever happened to have an extra (a so-called huangniu piao 黃牛票), by waving my money in an attractive fashion. This turned out to be too much for the theater to take, and they came up with a ticket for me. Just one more advantage of being a foreigner in Beijing. 2 From here on, I will be concerned with the question of presenting Jingju for the consumption of foreign audiences, and so will switch to “Peking opera,” the term for Jingju most familiar to that audience. 3 Logically, foreigners, and the equivalent Chinese term, waiguo ren 外國人, should include everybody but Chinese, but in practice, especially when it comes to the topic of this review, it basically means Euro-Americans. CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 37. 1 (July 2018): 57–74© 2018 David L. Rolston DOI 10.1080/01937774.2018.1524424 were they presented as positively as the most famous twentieth-century version of Bai Suzhen. Premiering in 1996, our first Legend of the White Snake (its Chinese name was Baishe chuanqi 白蛇傳奇; hereafter Legend1 ) was a joint production of the Beijing Opera School4 and the Chang’an Grand Theatre (Chang’an da xiyuan 長 安大戲院, originally established on Chang’an Avenue in 1937 near Xidan and reopened on the same street across town near Dongdan in 1996).5 Even before the official reopening of the theater, the famous Xun (Xun Huisheng 荀慧生 [1900–1968]) School actress Sun Yumin 孫毓敏, who had become the head of the opera school in 1991, and the general manager (zong jingli 總經理) of the theater, Zhao Hongtao 趙 洪濤, a former actor and then teacher at Beijing Opera School, began to develop the play (preparations took two years6 ). Both institutions faced formidable problems: when Sun took over the Beijing Opera School there was a budget deficit of 1,300,000 RMB,7 and when Zhao became manager of the theater he was given the goal of bringing in yearly receipts of...