‘Snake’ gets Chinese buzzing in Boston

Posted by James F. Smith February 24, 2010 10:05 AM

The world premiere this week of a new opera, “Madame White Snake,” has generated much excitement in the Chinese community in Greater Boston and beyond — including Boston’s Chinese sister-city, Hangzhou.

A six-member delegation from the Hangzhou municipal government arrived in Boston on Tuesday, in time for a reception by the opera’s supporters at the Four Seasons Hotel. But the main attraction for the visitors is tonight’s benefit gala performance at the Cutler Majestic Theatre. The legend of Madame White Snake, a snake-demon who becomes a woman so she can fall in love with a man, takes place in Hangzhou.

Tonight’s gala is not the official world premiere — that’s Friday night — but the first full performance of the opera provides a chance to celebrate several extraordinary collaborations. In creating the opera, librettist Cerise Lim Jacobs has fostered partnerships between the Boston arts world and the city’s Chinese community, as well as between Opera Boston and the Beijing Music Festival, in pulling off the first opera commissioned in Boston in decades.

[1]
Rehearsing “Madame White Snake.” Soprano Ying Huang works with director Robert Woodruff, and other cast members. Globe staff photo by Yoon S. Byun

I wrote an [2] account in the Sunday Globe about Jacobs, a former corporate lawyer and prosecutor, came up with the idea and then made it happen. My Boston.com colleague Scott LaPierre produced [3] a video about the opera, and a [4] photo gallery of pictures by Globe photographers shows it coming together.

The Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center worked with the “Friends of Madame White Snake” to create classes and seminars — including “Opera 101″ — to teach members about Western and Chinese opera over the past year. More than 1,000 school children took part, many at the Josiah Quincy School in Chinatown.

Jacobs even wrote a youth play based on the legend, entitled “When the White Snake Cries.” Hundreds of young people, many bused from Chinatown, attended the shows at the Art Barn Community Theater in Brookline, said Carmen Chan, director of development for the [5] Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, one of the region’s largest social service organizations.

Giles Li, the arts director for the center, says the arts programs have been a useful way for Chinese-Americans who have moved out to the suburbs to stay connected with their community, even if they no longer rely on the neighborhood center for social services.

Selina Chow, the board president of the BCNC who focuses heavily on education programs, connected with Cerise Lim Jacobs and Hsiu-Lan Chang, a Brookline resident who as co-chair of Friends of Madame White Snake has worked non-stop to engage the community and raised funds for the three-performance run. Together they built up the community outreach efforts.

Tonight’s gala was organized by the Friends to raise funds as well as acknowledge all the community involvement. The BCNC received 100 tickets for its members, and the Friends also have donated tickets to other groups including the Perkins School for the Blind and the Massachusetts National Guard.

Carole Charnow, the general director of [6] Opera Boston, said the opera “really has integrated the Chinese experience into the Theater District in a substantial and rich way.”

Elaine Ng, the executive director of the BCNC, said the opera project “is bringing back an element of our history and culture, and making it accessible. This is an opportunity to bring it back for Chinese immigrants, and Americans who don’t have the language. This opens up a whole new audience. It’s a whole different level of cultural exposure.”

The opera also has reawakened the mystery of the Madame White Snake legend, in Cerise Jacobs’ first English-language interpretation. “For me,” said Carmen Chan, “the demons always stood out. Now I see it as more of a love story.”

The Hangzhou delegation includes Xie Chongming, deputy director of the city’s foreign affairs office, and finance officials Zhang Zhen and Lu Bin. Hangzhou is one of  eight official sister cities for Boston. The city, located in Zhejiang Province southwest of Shanghai, is regarded as one of the most scenic and important cultural centers in China.

The opera may be performed at some point in Hangzhou. For now, it is scheduled to open the month-long [7] Beijing Music Festival in October.

Song Tu, the program director for the festival, said by telephone that the Beijing festival’s artistic director, Long Yu, had co-commissioned the work with Opera Boston in part because “he wants Westerners to open their eyes to China, and see how we can connect with the world through the music, through creative, imaginative methods, and not only to represent the more famous traditional repertoire.”

Song Tu is himself a product of the Boston-China connection. He got his master’s in clarinet performance at Boston University in the late 1980s and lived in Boston for almost 10 years. He said he has noticed how James Levine has also widened the repertoire of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in recent years, “and he is open to more cultures and perspectives.”

“Madame White Snake”, Song Tu said, is more than just Chinese culture, but reflects “the world’s culture. It is not not purely Western, and it is not Chinese Peking opera. I’m sure there are a lot of elements in between. And this is the point.”

[8] http://www.boston.com/news/world/worldly_boston/2010/02/snake_gets_chinese_buzzing_in.html