The Chinese title of this review published by Opera China says it all: Riding the Clouds in Somersaults, Sun Wukong Builds a Spectacular Golden Cultural Bridge. Read more here:

Translated by Zhen Zou

Riding the Cloud Somersault,

Sun Wukong Builds a Spectacular Golden Cultural Bridge

Everyone was amazed watching the huge, colorful dragon, exquisitely constructed of bamboo-bones and silk, dancing in the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. An utterance of marvel exploded from the audience that was rarely heard in a traditional opera house like this. After the dazzling colors settled down on the eye, however, what the new opera, The Monkey King, left us with was a delicate estrangement that commands pondering over.

This is probably one of the most enchanting, as well as thorny, issues in American opera today: when we have the best production resources in the world and a strong desire to fill the gap between an Asian narrative and a list of classical Western works, are we creating an opera with flesh and blood, or are we making an extremely expensive, most exquisite cultural show? The difference between these two was a fine line on the Opening Night of The Monkey King.

Needless to say, The Monkey King, created collaboratively by the “Golden Partners” of Chinese American composer Huang Ruo and Chinese American librettist David Henry Hwang, was an ambitious attempt. They tried to weave Journey to the West, a Chinese mythology full of Taoist arcane truths and Buddhist philosophy, into a Grand Opera House of the Western world. The result was a combination of a feast of sensory saturation and at the same time, an in-depth presentation of the western aesthetic of fleet footed elegance.

Director Diane Paulus was keenly aware of the audience for whom she was creating this work by opera, and she understood precisely the visual language a mythological opera requires in 21st-century San Francisco. For the majority of San Francisco’s season-ticket holders, Sun Wukong is far more than a mere literary character; he is a charismatic symbol—an Asian superhero. Collaborating with the brilliant puppeteer Basil Twist, Paulus has indeed conjured a dazzling, fantastical world.

Visual Spectacles: Between Possibility and Limitation

The stage design reconstructs the Flower-Fruit Mountain and the Heavenly Court through semi-abstract ink-wash aesthetics; yet its color saturation and visual intricacy are boldly pushed to the absolute extreme. Rather than serving as a rigid replication of tradition, this approach constitutes a keen response to the contemporary audience’s aesthetic appetite for “spectacle” — it does not shy away from entertainment value, and indeed, to a certain extent, takes pride in it.

The stage was brimming with fluid energy. Intricate multi-screen projections contributed a palette of intensely saturated colors—ranging from the suffocating, deep-sea azure of the Dragon Palace to the dazzling, fiery golden-red of the Celestial Court—as visual elements ceaselessly shifted and morphed. This relentless visual spectacle, to a certain extent, supplanted the music to become the true protagonist of the stage. When Sun Wukong wreaked havoc in the Celestial Palace, the grand mechanical contraptions and soaring puppets combined to create a visual extravaganza reminiscent of a Cirque du Soleil production in Las Vegas.

To push this spectacle to its absolute limit, the Monkey King in the production even, from time to time, “multiplies” into three distinct forms: in addition to the tenor who serves as the vocal core (the “true self”), there is a dance double tasked with executing the most demanding physical feats, as well as a puppet double, manipulated by figures clad in black. Coupled with an interpolated sequence of traditional shadow puppetry, the work as a whole presents a stylistic collage that borders on the carnivalesque. To borrow a metaphor from Eastern culinary arts, this is undoubtedly a feast of the utmost extravagance; yet, in its excessive pursuit of intense, concentrated flavors, it seems to have sacrificed a certain higher-order sense of “negative space”—of subtle restraint and lingering aftertaste.

This approach to staging is undoubtedly highly spectacular, successfully capturing the audience’s attention. While the stage design played an indispensable role in the success of The Monkey King, seasoned opera goers —accustomed to the psychological dramas characteristic of works by Verdi or Wagner—might find that the characters’ inner motivations appear overly obscured amidst this dazzling interplay of light and shadow. For instance, while we witness Sun Wukong in flight, it seems difficult to discern the inner burden he carried just moments before taking off. The stage design exudes a meticulously calculated “exoticism”—one that is sufficiently beautiful to strike Western audiences as novel, yet simultaneously familiar enough to avoid posing an overly radical challenge to their aesthetic sensibilities.

The Auditory Labyrinth: Music’s “Multidimensionality” and Dilemmas

If visual effect is this opera’s skin, music, needless to say, is its blood. For composer Huang Ruo, The Monkey King is an excellent canvas to demonstrate his signature composing idea of Multi-dimensionalism. Throughout the nearly three-hour-long performance, we witnessed how a composer of exquisite skill strove to build bridges across the fault lines between Eastern and Western musical vocabularies.

It must be acknowledged that Huang Ruo demonstrates astonishing imagination in his orchestral orchestration. Rather than simply transplanting Chinese traditional instruments wholesale into the orchestra pit, he has chosen a more complex path: utilizing the physical properties of the Western orchestra to simulate the sonic textures of Chinese traditional instruments.

With the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, we encountered a captivating sound — one imbued with a metallic sheen. Huang Ruo deftly stripped away the strings’ traditional, silken-smooth Romantic timbre, instead calling upon them to produce a drier, more percussive texture. This was particularly striking during the passages depicting Sun Wukong’s battle scenes, where the interplay between the brass and percussion sections proved truly impressive. The low-register growls of the trombones and tubas, paired with the timpani’s intricate syncopated patterns, simulated the driving energy characteristic of Peking Opera percussion (known as “Wuchang”). When experienced live in the theater, this simulation often exerted a palpable physical impact.

This approach to treatment is not merely an act of imitation, but rather one of reconstruction.

It allows the audience—when closing their eyes—to feel as though they can hear the thunderous clamor of gongs and drums from an ancient Chinese opera stage; yet, upon opening their eyes, they behold a standard-configuration symphony orchestra.

This constitutes Huang Ruo’s greatest triumph: he has crafted an aural landscape that feels simultaneously familiar and foreign—an audibly compelling form of “Eastern Cyberpunk.”

Ultimately, however, opera is an art form centered on the human voice. It is when we shift our focus from the brilliant orchestral textures to the vocal lines that problems begin to surface in this opera. Huang Ruo’s music proves remarkably effective in depicting “action” — those rapid, descending chromatic runs and sharp, dissonant chords align perfectly with the rhythmic pulse of every fight sequence on stage. This compositional approach possesses a distinctly cinematic quality; it serves the visual imagery and the action. Yet it rarely reveals the soul of the characters.

When the narrative reaches these moments requiring emotional depth and introspection, the music often appears hesitant and indecisive. For instance, in the first act—during Sun Wukong’s monologue expressing his yearning for immortality—the melodic line, despite its dramatic contours, replete with wide leaps and soaring high notes, lacks an intrinsic melodic logic—what might be termed “melodic inevitability.” We hear a mere stacking of notes and a display of technical virtuosity, yet we struggle to discern the kind of melodic motif that, in the hands of a Puccini or a Mozart, would strike directly at the heart. In these moments, the music becomes somewhat detached; it resembles a layer of exquisite wallpaper draped over the characters’ emotions, rather than the molten lava flowing forth from the depths of their souls.

This phenomenon becomes particularly evident in the handling of the bilingual vocals. The work boldly employs a bilingual vocal approach — alternating between English and Mandarin Chinese — which in itself constitutes an act of immense artistic courage. However, the syllabic stress inherent in English and the tonal contours characteristic of Mandarin present a natural friction when subjected to musical treatment. Huang Ruo attempts to preserve the tonal inflections of Mandarin within the melodic lines; but in terms of actual vocal acoustics, this approach occasionally disrupts the “legato” — the seamless, connected line—that “bel canto” singing strives to achieve.

The result is that when the performers sing in Mandarin—in an effort to ensure precise diction and vocal resonance—the melodies tend to sound somewhat conversational; conversely, when they switch to English, the melodic lines—designed to accommodate Western harmonic structures—can feel somewhat stiff. While this constant linguistic switching may be justifiable in terms of narrative logic (serving to distinguish the mortal world from the celestial court, or to differentiate distinct ethnic groups), musically speaking, however, it repeatedly disrupts the audience’s auditory flow, thereby creating a sense of alienation. This may well have been the composer’s deliberate intent; yet one might ask: is this sense of alienation perhaps a touch too intense? Or is it, perhaps, a deliberate attempt to subvert the operatic tradition of heightened emotional immersion?

Musically, the most thought-provoking—and indeed the most controversial—passage in the entire production is undoubtedly the musical treatment accompanying the entrance of Guanyin Bodhisattva. To provide a contrast to the boisterous “monkey nature,” Huang Ruo devised a musical language for Guanyin that is almost entirely static.

This passage bears distinct traces of Minimalism, evoking certain early works by Philip Glass or John Adams, yet it also incorporates the monotony characteristic of Buddhist chanting. The string section sustains long-duration, faint drones, over which woodwinds occasionally intersperse fragments of the pentatonic scale.

This approach is conceptually sublime, attempting to construct a sense of “emptiness” through music. Soprano Zhang Meigui, in the role of Guanyin, demonstrated astonishing breath control while singing the aria “All Laws Are Equal.” Her voice, like a silver thread, wove its way through the sparse orchestral backdrop.

However, from the perspective of dramatic tension, this prolonged “stillness” appears somewhat daring within the vast expanse of the opera house. For some members of the audience, it serves as a rare moment of meditation—a musical embodiment of Eastern philosophy; yet for others—those accustomed to the dramatic conflicts inherent in Western opera—this passage may come across merely as stagnation, or even monotony. For them, the music fails to propel the drama’s emotional conflicts to a pitch of intensity that would necessitate a subsequent moment of contemplative calm. Beautiful though it may be, it lacks the internal structural momentum required to drive the narrative forward. It resembles an exquisite Buddha statue: worthy of worship, but difficult to engage in dialogue.

Particular mention must be made of the conductor, Qi’an Guan. For a conductor, navigating a work filled with the Monkey King and celestial warriors — and featuring an exceptionally complex orchestration — constitutes a monumental challenge. Guan’s conducting style is clear and decisive, and she demonstrates superb command over complex mixed meters. In the most chaotic battle sequences, she successfully held the orchestra in the pit and the chorus on stage tightly together, without any noticeable disjunction—a feat that, in itself, represents a significant technical achievement.

However, in terms of balance, the sound from the orchestra pit occasionally felt overly dominant. Huang Ruo’s orchestration is inherently dense, with brass and percussion sections playing a particularly prominent role. In certain passages—specifically within the tenor’s middle register—”the work’s own exceptionally high sonic density objectively constricted the vocal lines’ breathing space.” This may well be an issue inherent to the orchestration itself; yet it also places heightened demands on the conductor regarding the fine-tuning of dynamic balance. Guan meticulously unearthed every detail and every subtle shift in timbre within the score; thus, rather than being a mere issue of live performance balance, this effect is perhaps better understood as a manifestation of the work’s own aesthetic pursuit of “fullness.”

The Dilemma of Symbolic Characters and Screenplays

The script likely represents the greatest challenge facing this production. David Henry Hwang faced the daunting task of condensing an epic comprising countless episodes into a stage presentation lasting just a few hours. His solution was to approach the material allegorically — a choice that, to some extent, resulted in the flattening of the characters.

Sun Wukong has been reimagined as a modern, American-style hero in pursuit of “freedom” and “identity.” This represents a highly astute and readily acceptable strategy for adaptation. The script’s dialogue—centered on themes of self-discovery and rule-breaking—resonates effortlessly with modern Western audiences. However, this approach also strips away the profound Buddhist philosophical fatalism and intricate social satire inherent in the original work.

In the original work, the tragedy of Sun Wukong lies in his ability neither to fully integrate into the established order — nor to completely break free from it; his rebellion is thus tinged with a sense of nihilism. In the opera, however, this complex “gray zone” is reduced to a stark, black-and-white exposition, failing to generate any concrete dramatic conflict. Here, Sun Wukong functions less as a flesh-and-blood being—one possessing a rich inner life, deep emotional depth, and profound internal contradictions—and more as a flawless symbol: an emissary bridging the values ​​of East and West.

The opera’s vocal segments feature lyrics in both English and Chinese; given the numerous citations from Buddhist scriptures embedded within the text, the provision of bilingual subtitles is undoubtedly a valuable aid to comprehension. Regrettably, however, the libretto lacks both the poetic expressiveness of genuine emotion and the philosophical acuity that offers profound insight into the human condition. Aside from the passages quoted directly from Buddhist works, the lines sung by Guanyin and the Buddha consist entirely of colloquial speech—specifically, a voluminous, rambling, repetitive, and overly literal succession of recitatives and arias.

Traditional Chinese theater distinguishes between “wenxi” (contemplative style) and “wuxi” (martial style); the “Monkey King” is a quintessential “wuxi” character in Peking Opera. Western opera, when viewed through this Chinese conceptual lens, constitutes a purely “wenxi” form; consequently, casting Sun Wukong in a “wenxi” role inevitably results in a sense of cultural incongruity. Perhaps only by refraining from burdening him with a rich and complex inner struggle—a world of deep emotional turmoil—can his essential “monkey spirit” be truly preserved.

A Respected Interpretation and a Cross-Cultural Bridge

The actors’ performances were impeccable; they infused this work with vibrant vitality.

Tenor Wang Kang, who sang the role of Monkey King, delivered a heroic performance. As a “spinto” tenor—a voice type characterized by immense volume—he faced a dual challenge: contending with a dense orchestral wall while simultaneously executing an extremely physically demanding stage performance. His voice possesses a highly penetrating, metallic timbre—particularly in the upper register—whose brilliant quality calls to mind the young Placido Domingo. He strove to imbue the character with a dignity that transcended mere playfulness; within the limited scope for psychological nuance, he nevertheless succeeded in capturing the character’s finest qualities.

Soprano Zhang Meigui proved to be another highlight of the evening. With a voice as warm and lustrous as jade, she provided a rare spiritual anchor amidst the clamor of this production. Her performance was not only technically impeccable but also, in its very essence, perfectly embodied the divine nature of the character.

The Monkey King is a highly successful production, as the theater erupted in enthusiastic and sincere applause at the curtain call, including from prominent supporters such as Jensen Huang and Jerry Yang, as well as many Chinese families who go to the opera house for the very first time.

From a commercial standpoint, the success of The Monkey King can probably be described as unprecedented. Not only were tickets for every performance completely sold out, but all 300 standing-room tickets were also snapped up. In terms of its impact, it stands as a “paragon of cultural diplomacy,” achieving remarkable success as a cross-cultural production.

However, when we strip away these stirring social connotations and view the work in isolation, this bridge connecting East and West appears to be constructed less of solid substance and more of exquisite postcards. Huang Ruo’s music has built a grand, kaleidoscopic auditory palace; yet, within its walls, it seems difficult to find a chamber where the soul might truly find repose. Traversing this bridge are, above all, resplendent cultural symbols and concepts—rather than flesh-and-blood human beings imbued with the true pain of lived experience.

This is a resplendent somersaulting cloud, soaring to dizzying heights and tumbling with exquisite grace. Yet, whether it amounts to nothing more than a magnificent debut—or if it will leave a profound imprint upon this landscape of art—perhaps only time will tell.