Parilla Performing Arts Center on Sunday, has the exuberant animal grace that’s best known to the West through the work of Jackie Chan. But only China’s acrobatic opera, which the Beijing Kunju Opera Theatre brings to Montgomery College’s Robert E.
Musically, of course, the latter are more closely linked to each other than to the products of 19th-century Europe’s opera houses.
That’s what separates the various styles of Chinese opera-Beijing, Cantonese, and other regional variations within China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong-not only from Verdi and Wagner but also from such Asian traditions as Japan’s Kabuki and Noh theater and Bali’s Baris dances. Still, even at its most bombastic, the Western style of opera lacks something that cinematic blockbusters can’t do without: action. Opera melds music and drama, comedy and romance, pathos and spectacle. Before there was cinema, there was opera, the first artistic form to combine the elements that Hollywood now takes for granted.
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