Culture - Chinese Opera

Monday we had a very interesting experience. We had tickets to attend a "real" Chinese Opera. Sister Aki arranged for us to experience this event. She went out about six months ago and stood in line to get the tickets for us. The tickets sold out quickly.

The theater was beautiful

And so, the Newells, Workmans, Benchs, Jackson and Aki’s all were off. We rode the ding ding out to North Point to the Sunshine Theater. We went for Thai food before going to the theater. We had fried rice, served in pineapples, chicken on skewers, and then we all ordered a dish. We opted for sweet and sour chicken. The rice was great, so was the chicken on skewers, but the sweet and sour was just so so. Too many hot peppers and too tough chicken.

The finale

We walked across the street to the theater and in we went, just minutes before show time. As we walked in, we became the center of attention. We were the only "gweilos" in the whole place, and there were smiles and surprise everywhere. They couldn’t believe that many Americans would actually be there.


The performance was interesting, beautiful, loud, hard on the ears, and strange all at once. The costumes were wonderful, as were the backdrops. The Aki’s tried very hard to keep us up with the story. The music is lots of drums and cymbals as well as discordant sounds. This group of performers are some of the best, and they had really good voices. And they had some interesting ways of presenting the story, for example when they wanted to show that the soldiers scaled the walls of the castle and conquered the king and his city, they had 4 men who ran across the stage and somersaulted over the about 6 foot high painted wall. Very creative and fun.


The performance began at 7:30pm and by 11:00 pm we were not close to the end. The Jackson’s and Newells called it quits at 11, the rest stayed to the end at 11:30 which they told us was very, very good. Dew and I had been awake since 4:30am and were having a hard time staying awake, and Elder Newell had to catch the early ferry to Macau so we threw in the towel early rather than stay to the bitter end. A quick ride home on the MTR and were we ever ready to hit the mattress.