SAN FRANCISCO — Speaking during a panel discussion here last weekend, the Chinese-American composer Huang Ruo recalled watching his children celebrate Halloween during the coronavirus pandemic, with his son dressed as Spider-Man and his daughter garbed as Elsa from Frozen.
“It made me realize,” he said, “that my children needed a hero they could call their own, an Asian counterpart to Spider-Man.” And that could only be Sun Wukong, more commonly known as Monkey King, Asia’s supreme superhero, loved and adored not only by Chinese people the past 500 years but increasingly by others all over the world via film, television, animation, and, most recently, the 2024 video game Black Myth: Wukong, which sold 18 million copies in its first two months.
Where, so we’re told, a certain familiar visitor from Krypton can leap tall buildings in a single bound, Monkey King can travel 34,000 miles in one somersault while making copies of himself, freezing people in place, and becoming invisible, all while retaining religious associations.
“I grew up with the Monkey King,” said Huang, who was born in the Hainan province of China in 1976 and now teaches composition at the Mannes School of Music in New York. “Monkey King was irreverent and full of tricks, but he also taught us to believe in our dreams, to distinguish right from wrong and to understand that true strength is using power to help others. It was a childhood dream of mine to make the Monkey King into something real.”
That dream came true last weekend at the War Memorial Opera House, where the San Francisco Opera presented — to an enthusiastic capacity audience — the premiere of The Monkey King in a quite spectacular production with music by Ruo and libretto by the playwright David Henry Hwang.
Commissioned by San Francisco Opera in partnership with the Chinese Heritage Foundation of Minnesota (partners in the 2016 San Francisco premiere of another Chinese classic, Dream of the Red Chamber), The Monkey King is based on the opening chapters of Journey to the West, the 16th-century novel attributed to Wu Cheng’en that is considered one of China’s greatest literary classics.
All told, there have been at least 70 adaptations of The Journey to the West story, said Ann Waltner, professor of history at the University of Minnesota and an expert in Chinese culture. “This is a novel that begs to be tampered with.”
This new adaptation, performed in English and Mandarin and uniting the disciplines of opera, dance, and puppetry, follows the ambitious and often arrogant young monkey who is born in a stone and goes on to challenge the gods of the sea and the sky in a bid for immortality.
“I didn’t think I could do this,” said Hwang. For one thing, having grown up in Los Angeles, he didn’t consider the 100-chapter novel part of his cultural identity. He and Ruo had already collaborated on three operas, the most recent of which was an adaptation of M. Butterfly, Hwang’s Tony-Award-winning play. So when Huang suggested that they work on The Monkey King, Hwang was puzzled about how to proceed, and he didn’t understand the main character.
“I tend to think of the Chinese character as modest and self-effacing and polite,” Hwang said. “Monkey King is completely the opposite. He’s the id of the Chinese character,” he added, invoking Freud. “He’s the impulsive, egotistical, self-aggrandizing type. Maybe that’s why he’s so popular with the Chinese and other Asians. In our version, Monkey undergoes a transformative, spiritual journey. It’s a redemption story.”
During brainstorming sessions, they hatched a novel idea: Monkey would be portrayed by three figures: a singer, a dancer, and a puppet. Basil Twist, a popular Bay-Area puppeteer who had worked with Huang before, was a natural choice for the production team.
In the opening scene of the opera, a chorus of Bodhisattvas — seekers of Nirvana — sing Buddhist sutras a cappella and are joined by Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy (sung with remarkable presence by soprano Mei Gui Zhang). Guanyin appears in a tear-drop-shaped carriage high above the stage, moving in and out of various scenes.
We soon encounter Monkey, played by the charismatic, vocally adroit Australian-Chinese tenor Kang Wang. Monkey has spent the past 500 years imprisoned by Buddha beneath the Five-Element Mountain. He’s been surviving on garbage and is not in a good mood. “Is it too much to ask for a banana?” he wails. Then he boasts, while expressing a touch of doubt, “I’m still good-looking.”
The rest of the story, until the end, when Monkey begins his journey toward enlightenment, is a series of flashbacks telling of the character’s high-voltage adventures, from the bottom of the sea, where he wrecks the entire under-water kingdom, to his epic battle with the gods in heaven, who turn out to be snooty and rather callous elites (“We live in luxury, ignoring the world below.”).
Throughout the evening, Huang gave evidence of being a skilled and instinctive opera composer. He speaks of a technique he calls “dimensionalism,” which he defines as drawing equal inspiration from Chinese folk, western avant-garde, rock, and jazz. Not all these idioms were apparent in this work, but, to be sure, the percussion writing, enhanced by the inclusion of Indonesian button gongs and a Chinese opera gong, made the battle scenes especially vivid, and there was a pungent lyricism to the solo vocal arias, especially those for Guanyin in the Diamond Sutra with its use of the descending glissandos associated with the vocal style of Peking Opera.
The cast was uniformly strong. Among these were South Korean tenor Konu Kim (an especially fierce Jade Emperor) and baritone Joo Won Kang (playing both the Dragon King and Lord Erling). Carolyn Kuan conducted an expressive, well-paced reading of the score, and Diane Paulus’ staging showed a shrewd sense of space and timing. Huiwang Zhang was such a riveting presence onstage in the dance role of Monkey King, with all that weird, sharp-angled body language he and choreographer Ann Yee came up with, that he overshadowed the puppet monkey — which we don’t see very often, making the three Monkeys idea no longer necessary or even sensible.
In contrast, if a design can be the star of a show, this was it. Thanks to Twist and Sara C. Walsh’s sets, Anita Yavich’s Chinese bronze-sculpture costumes, Ayumu “Poe” Saegusa’s lighting, and Hana S. Kim’s slide and video projections, the stage offered an endless series of eye-filling, often psychedelic images, always gradually shifting, as if the design were embracing the Buddhist idea of impermanence and constant change — the flowers opening up on a scrim, for instance, when Monkey starts to fly and the music takes on a post-minimalist beat. Or those amazing full-size puppet horses, whom Monkey sets free. These were moments of sheer magic.
Finally, it should be noted, this may not be the last we see of Monkey King. There are many more stories in Journey to the West yet to be told, Huang points out, perhaps enough for a Chinese Ring cyle. And the company management, commenting during intermission, said at least one sequel can’t be ruled out.
The story, in other words, is to be continued…
