Best bets

Broadway Musicals Wicked in Shanghai

Date: April 22-May 10 - 7:15 pm

Venue: Shanghai Culture Square

Price: 80-780 yuan

An international company of over 70 cast, crew and musicians will travel to China, with an additional 20 local crew and 7 musicians hired in Shanghai. This "eye-poppingly lavish show" includes 300 award-winning costumes, spectacular scenery, lighting and projections and a dazzling array of technical wizardry. Based on the international bestselling novel by Gregory Maguire that ingeniously re-imagines the stories and characters created by L. Frank Baum in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Wicked tells the incredible untold story of an unlikely but profound friendship between two sorcery students. Their extraordinary adventures in Oz will ultimately see them fulfill their destinies as Glinda the Good and the Wicked Witch of the West.

Drama - The Face of Chiang Kai-shek

Date: April 22-23 - 7:30 pm

Venue: Beijing Comedy Theater

Price: 80-400 yuan

This is a fictitious story written by a student of younger generation based on the school history about the senior teacher and the president.

In 1943, Chiang Kai-shek, who was the president of National Central University (renamed Nanjing University in 1950) invited three famous professors of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature to dinner. It made the three professors feel embarrassed: to go or not to go is an awkward matter. whether or not should they accept this invitation?

In 1967, in the former capital, Nanjing, the three professors were invesgated because of this matter. Each of them had different memories of whether they had been invited by Chiang Kai-shek and whether they had attended to Chiang Kai-shek's dinner.

Gabriela Montero Piano Recital

Date: April 22 - 7:30 pm

Venue: National Center for the Performing Arts

Price: 100-200 yuan

Gabriela Montero's visionary interpretations and unique improvisational gifts have won her a devoted following around the world. Anthony Tommasini remarked in The New York Times, "Montero's playing has everything: crackling rhythmic brio, subtle shadings, steely power in climactic moments, soulful lyricism in the ruminative passages and, best of all, unsentimental expressivity."

Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center Drama - A Streetcar Named Desire

Date: April 25-29 - 7:30 pm

Venue: National Center For the Performing Arts

Price: 160-280 yuan

Rejected from her hometown for "inappropriate" behaviors, Blanche DuBois has to stay with her sister in New Orleans. Her sister's family lives in a dirty apartment. Both of the sisters received an old-fashioned education of southern United States and got married for love. However, Blanche was in an unhappy marriage while the younger sister Stella married Stanley Kowalski, the son of a Polish immigrant. Blanche and Stanley develop a dislike for each other at first sight.

Beijing Kunqu Opera - Two Belles in Love

Date: April 22-29 - 7:30 pm every Saturday

Venue: Zhengyici Theater

Price: 280-880 yuan

Two Belles in Love is a lesbian-themed Chinese opera based on a 350-year-old play by Li Yu. The 2010 production was headed by Stanley Kwan, the first openly gay film director in the Chinese cinema scene. The premiere marked a shift in representations of homosexuality in contemporary China which did not remove homosexuality from the list of official mental illnesses until 2001. Publicity for the production plastered the city with imagistic challenges to the heteronormative visual landscape. The premier coincided a wider trend reviving the practice of male performers portraying female roles, discouraged since Communist victory in 1949. I analyze the production and its reception as examples of Chinese opera receiving comparatively more official and cultural leeway than other modes of cultural production to portray sexual diversity on the post-Mao Chinese stage.

St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra

Date: April 28-29 - 7:30 pm

Venue: National Center for the Performing Arts

Price: 100-680 yuan

The history of the orchestra began in 1931 when an ensemble was organized at the Leningrad Radio. Shortly after that, the ensemble grew to the level of a symphony orchestra. The orchestra, performing in the live air format and collaborating with many conductors, called for constant reinvigoration of a program and acquired flexibility in its performing manner. During the World War II Siege of Leningrad, this orchestra of Leningrad Radio was the only symphony orchestra remaining in the blockaded city. In August 1942, conducted by Karl Eliasberg, this orchestra played the historic Leningrad premiere of the Seventh Symphony by Shostakovich in the Philharmonia.