Classic tales get a reboot

According to Lei Wen, the general manager of SHOAC, the festival is the only one of its kind in China featuring classical Chinese operas.

This year, the festival running from March 11 to April 20 is showcasing 13 productions at SHOAC, including Kunqu, Peking operas, Shanghai's local Huju opera and a contemporary percussion music theater show of Mulan.

Pai's productions of the two traditional Kunqu operas are among the most anticipated of the series this year. But the renowned writer and scholar from Taiwan is best known for Taipei People, a representative work of Chinese modernism.

Over the past 15 years, Pai has gone to great lengths to promote Kunqu Opera by designing a new aesthetic that can take the 600-year-old art form to theater stages in the 21st century and attract young audiences.

In 2004, he created his first Kunqu piece Peony Pavilion, which featured young artists from the Suzhou Kunqu Opera Theatre. And since then he has done The Jade Hairpin in 2009 before The White Silk Robe in 2016 and The Story of Golden Lotus in 2018.

Pai compares the story of The White Silk Robe to ancient Greek tragedies and plays by William Shakespeare.

In the story, a young judge needs to make a difficult choice when he realizes that the man he has known as his father for the past 18 years is actually a villain who once attempted to murder his birth father and forced his mother into a nunnery.