Red Hare’s Wish at The Space is an original stage musical by Um Actualee Theatre, a newly founded East Asian theatre company based in London. The piece is based on the Chinese Classic “Romance of The Three Kingdoms”. It boasts new compositions that blend traditional East Asian motifs with a retro-modern twist. Jialun Qi is the composer/writer of Red Hare’s Wish. For our readers a promo code RHW3K15 is available for all tickets!
1. What inspired you to adapt Three Kingdoms into a musical, and how do you balance staying true to the original story while adding your own narrative touch?
All East Asian cultures are familiar with the Three Kingdoms story. It is one of the few traditional-Chinese-setting stories that has transcended borders and made inroads into global pop culture. It was the natural choice for a project based around community collaboration.
The story of Three Kingdoms is meandering and convoluted, with thousands of names and locations across 120 dense chapters. By identifying the leads – Liu Bei, Cáo Cāo, Lǚ Bù – and where their paths intersect, one can shift the narrative-focussed source material into a character-focussed adaptation and retain key story beats without compromise.
2. Can you explain how you integrate traditional East Asian motifs with retro-modern elements in the music composition? What challenges did you face in blending these styles?
The musical influences are simply a product of what I know and what resources were available to me to create them:
– I know classical and neoclassical music, because I studied them.
– I know soviet-communist style patriotic songs, because I grew up with them.
– I like the committee-composed Chinese orchestral music from the 1950s-60s, such as the Butterfly Lovers Concerto and the Yellow River Piano Concerto, so I tried to mimic their sweeping melodic lines.
– I like listening to The Weeknd and Billie Eilish, and wanted to mimic their use of retro synths to create new sounds.
– The Phantom of the Opera and Hamilton are my case studies for this project, and I wanted to create a sound that blended the form of Phantom and the energy of Hamilton.
I wrote and produced the whole thing on a computer in my living room using mostly virtual instruments, so I was severely limited on what sounds I could produce to a satisfactory quality – this mostly meant synths, piano, and a few specific string sounds.
So it is both by intention and by limitation that the resulting sound is a combination of all these above factors.
3. The characters such as Liu Bei, Cáo Cāo, and Lǚ Bù, are iconic figures from Chinese literature. How did you approach developing their personalities and motivations for the stage?
I simply applied contemporary Western literary techniques (like The Hero’s Journey) to distil story arcs for these characters. Their personalities are very much in line with their traditional stereotypes; where it has differed from the source material lies in replacing a few outdated motivations.
In the book, Liu Bei is tangentially related to royalty, and that fact gets them out of trouble and the ‘right of way’ repeatedly, like a magical wand that tells Liu Bei, ‘you are in the right because of your birth’. It is at odds with how Liu Bei is portrayed – self-made, compassionate, but also bitter and indecisive and quite often not in the right at all. I get the sense that the 14th century author was so obligated to expound on themes of fealty and loyalty to the status quo, that he had to twist what was essentially a self-made rebel into a ‘actually, Liu Bei’s rebellion is out of loyalty and because he is royalty’, so he could avoid the ire of the authorities.
Conversely, Cáo Cāo is the ‘villain’ in the book because he dared to take power for himself by following ‘right of way’ cynically. The author writes his character with the same flawed nuance as Liu Bei – cunning, charismatic, but cowardly and egotistical. But now and then Cáo Cāo commits senseless murder or stupid mistakes completely out of character, as if to declare ‘look out, I’m a villain, you’re not supposed to like me.’
Contrast this with a Western narrative like Hamilton, where Alexander Hamilton openly declares that he wishes for a war so he could advance; that he did not have connections or money and is entirely self-made; that he is a rebel and steals cannons from the authorities and that is treated as a positive. This description can be directly transcribed to Cáo Cāo, who would be labelled a villain whereas Hamilton is clearly, by the framing of the author, ‘good’.
The single key change in this stage musical adaptation is replacing the framing of the 14th century author with that of my own. As a result, events and characters and story beats have remained faithful to the original work, but I think the audience will still find everything completely different, simply because the new author – me – does not conform to the same societal pressures as the author of the source material.
4. With such a complex and multifaceted story, how do you ensure that the audience can follow the narrative and connect with the character’s journeys?
I find that the main thing keeping audiences engaged are not good or bad characters, but consistent ones. As long as the suspension of disbelief is upheld, any complexity can be understood, as the audience will actively put in the effort to understand what is happening.
For me, the key to maintaining the suspension of disbelief is an authentic portrayal of humanity. Societies and nations change, but human traits like love, hate, compassion, jealousy, are timeless. Anyone can connect and identify with these feelings as they are ubiquitous across borders and continents. Only when you care about the characters, will you care about the chess moves they are making.
This musical has minimal spectacle and has a raw, intense focus on portraying the humanity within these larger-than-life characters. This is what I personally find the most interesting and connects the best with audiences.
5. How does it address themes of power, loyalty, and personal struggle, and what do you hope audiences will take away from experiencing this musical adaption?
I hope the audience will be entertained and moved by the emotions and the words of our fantastic cast. No one is going to a musical for an education, so there is no need to take away anything – other than (hopefully) having a good time while you are there.