Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.Why did I go see Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise? Was it my desire to spend more time at the Shed, the new performance and art space at the Hudson Yards? Was it my morbid curiosity to see what a martial arts musical with the songs of Sia, by the writers of Kung Fu Panda, would look like? Or was it just a gross miscalculation on my part? What if it was all three? Tickets Through July 27 at The Shed, Manhattan 64,. And the Shed especially, supported with $75.5 million in public funds, needs to set higher goals than those of a high-end mall. Theater is hard enough to get right when it emerges from coherent need, not a cultural blind date. Disasters are a useful part of the cultural ecology, like controlled burns.īut there are opportunity costs here as well: Think of all the things an investment of this size - “in the low millions,” according to Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director - could have achieved, or at least attempted, if more wisely spent? The “Dragon Spring” stage alone cost $650,000 to build. What has me upset and agitated isn’t so much the silly, boring show itself. And very agitated about … something else. The ensemble of 14 is very upset about … something. The more conventional dancing ( choreographed by Akram Khan) does a better job of expressing at least generic angst. Because the performers cannot connect with their opponents while executing their elaborate kicks and hand chops, the visceral thrill of whoosh and thwack is missing, replaced mostly by compensatory grunts and obvious inches of empty air. Rylander, includes strobe effects that could induce a stroke in someone who has already died of a stroke.īy default, it seems that the engine of “Dragon Spring” is meant to be its martial arts exhibitions, staged by Zhang Jun, but they too are a problem. The mostly purple and green lighting, however, by Tobias G. None of this will raise the heartbeat of anyone who’s seen a Cirque du Soleil show. There’s also a pretty moment when Little Lotus somehow gets hooked up like a hose to become a fountain, flooding (or rather empuddling) the stage. (The set is by Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams.) Fire is involved, as is a modest amount of aerialism. Seats for 1,200 patrons are arranged on three sides of a playing space crowned by panels of sheer fabric wafting above the action like jellyfish. These mindless stabs at narrative make a bizarre basis for what is evidently meant to be cutting-edge stagecraft. Chen’s direction stretches the evening to nearly two hours - it will fall to those light bulbs, now young adults, to restore peace through joint parricide and quasi-incest.
But to the extent kung fu usually provides thrills, and musicals usually tell stories through song, the new genre is a misnomer if not an outright lie. I can report that what the director Chen Shi-Zheng and the “ Kung Fu Panda” writing team of Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger have come up with does involve martial arts and tonal sounds. The show’s mismatched creators - apparently assembled by random spins of a Rolodex - call the result a kung fu musical. But the McCourt might as well be a Lululemon as long as it’s housing “Dragon Spring”: a product involving acres of spandex and designed to be internationally inoffensive. “Here” was the McCourt, the spectacular if poorly ventilated new performance space created when the Shed’s 120-foot-tall puckered carapace is rolled eastward from the main building to cover some of the few square feet of Hudson Yards not colonized by commerce. I mean beyond those I scrawled in my notebook during “ Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise,” which opened at the Shed on Thursday: experiences like “Huh?” and feelings like “Get me out of here.” What were the authors trying to accomplish? What experience did they mean to impart, what feelings did they hope to arouse? Usually when I see an awful show I try to understand what happened.
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