Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015. xv, 266 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$60.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-252-03911-9.
This social history of Cantonese opera in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century China, Southeast Asia, and North America presents a wealth of data culled from archived documents that have recently become available for scholarly examination. Many details presented in the volume, such as the strategically delayed opening of the legendary Lee Theater in Hong Kong in early 1927 (59), are historical gems that Cantonese opera connoisseurs will savor. Academic readers will identify many suggestions for further studies, which range from technical analyses of Cantonese opera as artistic-commercial enterprises in the urbanized cities of Guangzhou and Hong Kong to specialized examinations of uniquely meaningful events, such as a disastrous engagement in Honolulu in 1923 (165 to 168), or the impact Ouyang Yuqian (1889–1862), a noted performer of Peking opera and kunqu, asserted through his directing of the Guangdong Theater Research Institute (96–99) from 1929 through 1931.
Flanked by an introduction and a conclusion, the eight chapters of the volume are divided into three parts: chapters 1–3; chapters 4–5; and chapters 6–8. Chapter 1 tells not only the genre’s humble beginning as local and marginalized theatre, which had to compete with Peking opera and other “nationalized” genres from the north, but also its distinctive institution of itinerant actors, who performed on rural stages, but lived in, and travelled with, “red boats” floating along South China waterways. The chapter tells many fascinating details, such as living quarter arrangements and social hierarchy on the vessels (29). Chapter 2 traces the rise of commercialized Cantonese opera in the cities of Guangzhou and Hong Kong, showcasing the ways urbanization shaped the development of the genre’s theater houses and artistic-financial operations. This chapter features some insightful but not fully explained observations: the ways indoor and commercialized shows stimulated more singing with natural voices (36); the need to draw a fee-paying audience generated demands for performance novelties (37); contracts (shiyue) between mentors and disciples and “acceptance of engagement” (banling) reflected business attempts to secure “cheap” and “stable” labour (40–41); that rural and regional disorder in early twentieth-century China prompted professional troupes to settle in Guangzhou and Hong Kong (43–48), where stars and dramatists, such as Bai Jurong (1892–1974), Ma Shizeng (1900–1964), Xue Juexian (1904–1956), and Mai Xiaoxia (1904–1941) (48–55), rose to fame. Chapter 3 constitutes a detailed account of the rise and decline of Cantonese opera as a form of public entertainment in the decades of the 1920s and 1930s. Convincingly, this chapter tells how “brotherhood troupes” (xiongdi ban) emerged as a way for owners to control expenses and insure against losses (63), underscoring their efforts to creatively deal with the vicissitudes of their operations.
Part 2 begins with chapter 4, which provides a revealing account of the ways political plays and women performers challenged early Cantonese opera dominated by male and professional performers, demonstrating how the genre interacted with external forces. Chapter 5 nuances conventional Cantonese opera history with sociological perspectives: urban theater as a site of chaos, lawlessness, and violence (109–113); struggles between antagonistic and hierarchical groups of participants, ranging from owners, managing elders, senior performers to struggling instrumentalists (113–118); and state control through taxation and censorship (121–127).
Part 3, comprising chapters 6 through 8, examines early Cantonese opera in transnational contexts. Chapter 6 contrasts the successes of energetic and known entrepreneurs, such as E Tong Sen (1877–1941) (142–145) of colonial Singapore, with the failures of nameless and struggling producer-performers in North American Chinatowns (145–151). Chapter 7 documents Cantonese opera development as a transnational phenomenon based in Vancouver, Canada. Chapter 8 describes Cantonese opera communities of patrons, entrepreneurs, performers, and audiences who artistically and socially interacted as immigrants in racialized North America. To conclude, the volume briefly reiterates major arguments made in the chapters, and analytically reports on Gui Mingyang’s (1909–1958) career as a case study of Cantonese opera developments in early twentieth-century China and North America.
The report makes a fitting ending to a scholarly volume that provides a wealth of data but also raises many unanswered questions. Like a prism, it reflects what the author has admirably achieved and what he has to do to produce a more comprehensive history of Cantonese opera in the future. The author is to be commended for having patiently combed through many archived documents to strategically identify a diversity of detailed facts, and for having weaved them into a broad narrative about early Cantonese opera, which transformed from a regional opera to a transnational performance of Chinese identities and urban realities in the early decades of the twentieth century. The author is to be thanked for raising many fundamental but unanswered questions on the ways acting, dancing, singing, speaking and other creative and performance practices of the multi-media genre might have transformed. A full discussion of the issues clearly demands not only a more lengthy volume but also a more interdisciplinary approach to the available data, which might not tell much about the genre’s early performance practices and/or expressive features.
As the author noted, much of early Cantonese opera was performed with merely synoptic scripts (tigang; 136–137), kind of short-hand notes for the performers, which hardly describe what was actually performed and which are quite opaque to non-performers. Whether and what the scripts and other related resources tell, however, cannot be ascertained until they are meticulously catalogued and thoroughly studied. Hopefully, the author would produce, in the near future, an annotated catalogue of the documents he has examined or has yet to examine. Such a catalogue would not only complement this substantive volume, but also prompt the writing, by the author or his associates, of a comprehensive history of Cantonese opera as a multi-media theatre of expressive bodily movements, colorful costumes and face-make-up, operatic sounds, and dramatic words. Only such a history would answer the fundamental questions raised but not answered in this substantive but still exploratory history on early Cantonese opera.
Joseph S.C. Lam
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
pp. 136-138