Wing Chung Ng. The Rise of Cantonese Opera.

Abstract

The Rise of Cantonese Opera is a most welcome book about an opera form that is less covered in the English-language literature than is its northern “rival,” Peking opera. The book traces the roots of Cantonese opera in nineteenth-century Guangzhou and follows its development until the late 1930s, ending with the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Basing his argument on various previously untouched sources, Wing Chung Ng provides a highly dynamic historical narrative of Cantonese opera, which gives particular attention to individual agency, institutions, and networks, all of which promoted and pushed Cantonese opera through modern China’s complicated history and into overseas communities in the U.S. and Canada. Divided into three larger parts, the book starts historically with the “Formation of Cantonese Opera in South China.” Ng detects early efforts to incorporate popular performance styles such as yiyang and bangzi in the Guangzhou area during the mid-Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), and illustrates the rise of Cantonese opera as a plebeian form of entertainment in rural areas, largely excluded from the exclusive stages in Guangzhou until the late nineteenth century. Deep insight into the organizational structure of the opera business offers Ng’s exploration of the role of opera business houses (xiban gongsi), which were supported by merchant capital and often controlled by the troupe owner and their partners based in Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Troupes tried to avoid performing in the lawless and often dangerous rural areas and successfully pressed for engagements at the urban theaters, so the 1920s became the golden and highly competitive years of Cantonese opera. This was the decade of individual actors, high salaries, daring performances, opera reform, innovative background stages, new libretti, and professional scriptwriters. With the genre focused on six role types, a new star system evolved, and “Cantonese opera blossomed as a popular entertainment driven by commercial interests and market demand” (55). However, opera entertainment was a vulnerable business: the 1925 demonstrations in Shanghai and Guangzhou, the Hong Kong strike, the costs for large troupes and their extravagances, the popularity of sound film, and the downturn of the global economy in the early 1930s threw the opera world into unemployment and a struggle for survival that only few actors managed to survive.