A mural of "Dream of the Red Chamber," a classic Chinese epic, appears in Nanjing railway station. (Photo : Getty Images)
Surprisingly getting past the San Francisco Symphony or the San Francisco opera gala nights in terms of ticket sales, China's epic "Dream of the Red Chamber" appears to be the headliner for the fall arts season in the Northern California area, an SF Chronicle story cited.
"Dream of the Red Chamber," which is based on an 18th-century novel dubbed as Asia's take on the Shakespearean quintessential "Romeo and Juliet," is slated to debut on Sept. 10.
Featuring a stellar all-Asian cast, the opera which was first commissioned in 2013, will be performed and sung in English.
The industry A-listers joining the dream team include David Henry Hwang, a Tony Award-winning playwright most popular for "M. Butterfly," and Academy Award-winning Tim Yap, most recognized for his art directorial stint in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."
The opera has been gaining an outpour of support not only from Chinese in the SF Bay Area but from Chinese-Americans as well. News is that these group of spectators is "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," the article wrote.
Chinese-American and "The Joy Luck Club" author Amy Tan noted that for the Chinese, "there's a great pride that something that is so classic now gets reincarnated."
For Jay Xu, the Asian Art Museum director in San Francisco, 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."
Hailing it as an "epoch-making event," Xu noted that the "Dream of the Red Chamber" comes at a time when the Western and Chinese world are escalatingly getting intertwined.
"Many TV productions, stage plays, Chinese operas, dances and numerous artistic productions of this story have been made," said Pearl Bergad, Hong Kong native and a Minneapolis philanthropist, shared.
Bergad, who tapped her connections to make her idea for the opera come into reality, added: "It's such a grand story, it deserves the European grand opera treatment."
General director David Gockley also mention that he was overwhelmed when he learned that the 2,500-page novel 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."
Tickets for the six performances, priced at $26 to $397, first went on sale on June 27. One month after, the article cited that 75 percent of the seats had already been sold.
