Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center celebrates 75 anniversary

Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center announced on Oct 11 its performance plan for 2025, when the company will celebrate its 75th anniversary.

The center announced six heavy-weight productions for the coming year. Coming first will be a new theater adaptation of The Deer and Cauldron, a martial art novel by the master of the genre and the most widely-read author in Chinese, Jin Yong (1924-2018).

The Cycle of Fate, written by Chen Si'an and directed by Ma Da, is adapted from part of the Chinese literary classic, Outlaws of the Marsh, or Shui Hu Zhuan in Chinese. The play features the story of Lin Chong, one of the 108 outlaws in the novel. In the play, the hero finds himself returning to the critical moments of his life, trying to change the cycle of his tragic fate by making a different choice.

Normandie Apartments is based on the suspense novel of the same title by Gao Yuan. This, and The Deer and Cauldron are both directed by He Nian, a multiple-award-winning theater artist who has built a luminous portfolio working with SDAC through the past decades.

SDAC will have three major new productions created in collaboration with artists from abroad next year.

British theater artist Rich Rusk has worked with SDAC before, creating The Dreamer in 2017, adapted from the Chinese Kunqu opera classic Peony Pavilion, and Shan Hai Jing in 2019, or The Classic of Mountains and Seas, an ancient Chinese book about mythical creatures. His upcoming third work with the center will be a theater adaptation in Chinese of The Metamorphosis, a novel by Franz Kafka.

The fifth project is a Chinese production of End of the Rainbow. The play about the last days of American singer and actress Judy Garland was written by Peter Quilter and directed by Paul Garrington. The play won three Tony Award nominations and four Laurence Olivier Award nominations.

Finally, British theatre artist Andy Arnold will work with SDAC to create a Chinese adaptation of the French literary classic, The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas.

Altogether, SDAC made 684 shows of 39 productions in the year 2024, of which 8 are newly created, with 31 remakes.

The company emerged from the Shanghai People's Art Theater (established in 1950) and Shanghai Youth Theater (founded in 1957) in 1995. The only state-owned dramatic company in the city, the center was converted from a public institution to Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center Co. Ltd in 2009.