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(That's Shanghai)
Updated: 2008-02-18 15:14

Like a recurring dream, China's definitive classic tome, The Dream of the Red Mansion , an 18th-century novel by Cao Xueqin, is appearing in various formats throughout the city.

The charming and quirky masterpiece narrates the tale of the Jias, an aristocratic family in decline, and the people who orbit their sphere. In its latest incarnation, this complex and lengthy tale (the first 26 of the 120 chapters, runs about 500 pages in translation), was simmered down to its essence in a Western ballet version performed by the Shanghai Dance company in November. Meanwhile, a stage version of the 1962 Yue Opera version, which reduces the novel to a love-story between Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu, played to sold-out seats at the Majestic Theater in November.

If that weren't enough, there were two film adaptations of the 1962 Yue Opera version concurrently showing in cinemas during December. Indeed, Danny Wei, the Beijing-based producer behind both films, felt that the story was so compelling that one film would not suffice. The two films were funded by the Central Cultural Bureau to the tune of RMB 3.8 million. One version clocks in at two hours, while the second runs three-and-a-half hours. The latter one sold out in a few hours, and had the most of the audience in tears.

The novel's current wave of popularity, Wei speculates, is due to a marriage of theme and form. The novel is a story about women and celebrates an eclectic array of female characters. This makes it well suited to Yue opera, where female actors play both the male and female roles. Yue opera, though native to the Yangtze River Delta, is popular in Shanghai which has earned a national reputation as a "omen's city". "Even (the hero) Jia Baoyu is really like a woman," claims Wei. "Because he is the only boy in the family and is surrounded by women, he acts just like them."

Or perhaps it's that this timeless love story, a Chinese version of Romeo and Juliet, takes the audience back to the days when true love, pure and simple, was something worth believing in.