Debuting Sept. 10, “Dream” is based on an epic 18th century novel — a love story that’s as well-known in Asia as “Romeo and Juliet” is in the West. Commissioned in 2013, the opera, to be sung in English, features a dream-team, all-Asian cast on stage and behind the scenes, including Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang of “M. Butterfly” fame, and Tim Yip, whose art direction for the film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” earned an Academy Award.
The opera has unleashed an outpouring of support from an audience that hasn’t traditionally been part of that archaic tradition — Chinese and Chinese Americans from the Bay Area to Beijing. This Who’s Who of Asian society and business billionaires is a group rushing to support the production, making five- and six-figure donations and vying for gala night tickets priced at $3,000 per person to $250,000 for a table of 10, the most expensive such table in San Francisco history.
“For Chinese people, there’s a great pride that something that is so classic now gets reincarnated,” said Amy Tan, author of the best-selling “The Joy Luck Club,” and one of more than a dozen prominent Chinese Americans on the fundraising and opening night committee.
Jay Xu, director of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, called it an “epoch-making event,” noting that at a time when China and the Western world are becoming increasingly intertwined, the opera “provides a window into the classical literature and culture of China, just as Shakespeare’s works would do for the English literature and culture.”
Individual tickets for the six performances, which run $26 to $397, went on sale June 27; within a month, 75 percent of the seats had been sold.
The cultural significance of the 2,500-page novel initially was lost on the opera’s general director, David Gockley, who had never heard of it until a few years ago. Once he learned it was “the equivalent of ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ to the Greek world, ‘The Aeneid’ to the Romans and Italians, and the works of Shakespeare in their entirety to English-speaking cultures,” he recalled, “I said, ‘Whoa! Hello, Dolly!"
His goal in this production is the same one that has driven his 43-year career: to embrace diversity and build new audiences. This particular story’s cultural reach across China, Taiwan and Hong Kong is the primary reason the adaptation is sending ripples through the Chinese diaspora that are even bigger than those generated by his commissioning of Tan’s novel “The Bonesetter’s Daughter.” That opera premiered to a run of sell-out shows in 2008.
Another reason for the waves of excitement: prestige.
“Many TV productions, stage plays, Chinese operas, dances and numerous artistic productions of this story have been made,” said Pearl Bergad, a Minneapolis philanthropist and Hong Kong native who came up with the idea for the opera and worked her connections to make it reality. “It’s such a grand story, it deserves the European grand opera treatment.”
Doreen Woo Ho, a San Francisco banking executive and a committee co-chairwoman, noted that the novel’s plot is woven with elements of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, and is so complex that it has spawned its own line of academic research called Redology.
“The upstairs, the downstairs — with 2,500 pages and 500 characters, there’s no way to tell all the stories,” Ho said. “This could’ve been a ‘Downton Abbey’ that went on for 10 years.”
The new work’s timing, on the heels of the Sept. 9 season-opening Opera Ball, is intended to give opening weekend extra excitement. Like “Bonesetter,” it’s drawing a different crowd — a more demographically diverse group of wealthy donors and everyday people than ordinarily is seen at the opera, where audiences tend to be older and white.
Scheduled to attend on opening night are Hong Kong billionaire Allan Wong, co-founder of the electronic toymaker Vtech Holdings; WI Harper co-founder Peter Liu, a pioneer of venture capital in Asia, and his sister, Annie Liu Wong; Shirley Soong, who hails from a prominent diplomatic family in China and Taiwan; and Ted Lipman, chief executive officer of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation in Hong Kong.
The committee, whose ranks include Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Asian Art Museum Director Jay Xu, San Francisco Ballet principal dancer Yuan Yuan Tan and businesswoman Margaret Liu Collins, has conducted outreach during the past year that has garnered $1.5 million toward the $2 million cost of the production.
Culturally, Chinese philanthropists favor educational causes (making $100 million donations to Harvard, Princeton and Stanford universities, for example), followed by medicine and health, and Asian art, said Ho. Opera has been a new sell — but not necessarily a hard one.
Some $250,000 for the commissioning of the opera came from an unexpected source: the Chinese Heritage Foundation of Minneapolis.
It was Bergad, the foundation’s executive director (and a retired molecular biologist), who pitched the idea to the American Composers Forum in 2001. The idea sat until 2009, when she mentioned it to the founder of the Chinese Heritage Foundation, Ming Li Tchou, who immediately pledged $100,000 for the commission. They, in turn, met with Kevin Smith, then retiring as president of the Minnesota Opera, who pitched the idea to a longtime industry colleague — Gockley — who has 43 world premieres under his belt.
News of the production has spread quickly through Chinese cultural associations, including the Committee of 100, a nonpartisan group with global members dedicated to furthering Chinese-American relations, the Northern California chapter of the Asia Society, the Peninsula Chinese Club, the 1990 Institute in Burlingame, and of course, Chinese media.
“The Chinese community, whether local, national or international,” said Ho, “is never separated more than six degrees of separation.”
Other efforts have included a dinner at Tan’s home and three salons for donors — one in Manhattan, another at committee co-chairman Tim Kahn’s East Bay home (with Hwang, the opera’s librettist), and a third at the South Bay home of Joyce and Ta Lin Hsu, a venture capitalist, with Taiwanese playwright Stan Lai, stage director for “Dream.” (Renowned composer Bright Sheng is creating the opera’s music.)
Gorretti Lui, another co-chairwoman, is planning a sumptuous, eight-course dinner for 250 guests (including five billionaires) in the opera house’s opulent Green Room before the performance. The gala is being kept small so as not to compete with the Opera Ball, the biggest fundraiser of the year.
Committee members have been urging skeptics to have faith that the opera’s story will be Chinese, but the music will be romantic and lyrical — unlike traditional Chinese opera, which uses a pentatonic scale (with fewer notes per octave than Western music’s heptatonic scale) and incorporates dancelike movements and exaggerated painted faces.
“A lot of people don’t like Chinese opera; I don’t like Chinese opera,” said Tan. “This is not Chinese opera. These are not the singers who have those very strangely pitched voices.”
No one has yet heard the opera in its full, finished form, but already, negotiations are in the works to take the production to the Hong Kong International Festival, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other cities — and perhaps, one day, said Lui, even Milan’s La Scala, London’s English National Opera or the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
“I tell them that 200 years ago when ‘Carmen’ was produced, no one knew the tunes that would be produced, and now everyone loves it,” Lui said. “The tune will come into your head and will become like pop music.”
Source: SF Chronicle by Carolyne Zinko