(These wisps of tune, wanly sung and with lyrics that sound mistranslated from Klingon, are credited to the pop musician Sia and others.) Most of the show’s music is disembodied and ambient, whether live or prerecorded I could not tell. But to the extent kung fu usually provides thrills, and musicals usually tell stories through song, the new genre is a misnomer if not an outright lie.įor one thing, there are only (by my count) three songs, by which I mean words sung by characters in a story. I can report that what the director Chen Shi-Zheng and the “Kung Fu Panda” writing team of Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger have come up with does involve martial arts and tonal sounds. The show’s mismatched creators - apparently assembled by random spins of a Rolodex - call the result a kung fu musical. But the McCourt might as well be a Lululemon as long as it’s housing “Dragon Spring”: a product involving acres of spandex and designed to be internationally inoffensive. “Here” was the McCourt, the spectacular if poorly ventilated new performance space created when the Shed’s 120-foot-tall puckered carapace is rolled eastward from the main building to cover some of the few square feet of Hudson Yards not colonized by commerce. I mean beyond those I scrawled in my notebook during “Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise,” which opened at the Shed on Thursday: experiences like “Huh?” and feelings like “Get me out of here.” What were the authors trying to accomplish? What experience did they mean to impart, what feelings did they hope to arouse? By all means, let’s look beyond this martial arts muddle in anticipation of The Shed’s next major endeavor.Usually when I see an awful show I try to understand what happened.
#DRAGON SPRING PHOENIX RISE SEATS FREE#
(I suspect that plenty of free tickets are destined to be disbursed during the show’s month-long run.) It is not unusual for fledgling performing arts centers to need some time to find their artistic bearings, and this appears to be the case for The Shed’s first season. The event is performed in the McCourt space at The Shed, which has been configured to seat 1,200 spectators. Perhaps connoisseurs of kung fu artistry will be able to appreciate Zhang Jun’s martial arts choreography, but otherwise Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise is a work of staggering inanity. Ceaseless waves of pretty, if pretty busy, colored and patterned lighting manage to animate these proceedings considerably more artfully than the script, music, staging, or performances. This leaves plenty of room for frequent martial arts mayhem upon the floor, which is accented by water and fire effects, and occasional aerial flights traveling up and down an 80-foot height. There also are two interludes at night clubs where gyrating dancers wear what appear to be futuristic pajamas.Īnyway, the twins meet up when they are 18 years old and their nearly incestuous reunion on the dance floor leads to even further kung fu combat and, improbably enough, a happy ending.Īll of this transpires within a cavernous open space that is overhung by a pale forest of fabric streamers and which features a semi-circular stage, a modest outcropping, and a spindly elevated skywalk. The details of some rigamarole concerning a legendary key to eternal life escape me, but whatever it signifies will motivate a duplicitous marriage, a mortal betrayal, a ritualistic funeral, and, of course, various exhibitions of kung fu fighting. Set in and around Flushing, Queens, of all exotic locales, Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise centers on fraternal twins, boy and girl, separated as infants and reared to be martial arts warriors by their murderously estranged parents.
In the meantime, it is impossible to tell whether the show’s 20 performers are lip-syncing or actually singing. By no means do these numbers illuminate the tale or push it along. Half a dozen pop songs composed by Sia, such as “The Greatest” and “Courage,” here excessively remixed and heavily amplified, provide the canned soundtrack. While this world premiere features plenty of simulated kung fu combat, a musical it is not. That wild, high-octane, immersive spectacle, which enjoyed a 2007-2016 New York run, dealt out a lot more entertainment than Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise, a show that desperately strives to thrill audiences at The Shed and fails to do so majorly.īilled as a kung fu musical, Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise offers a two hour-long mishmash of martial arts fighting, antic club-style choreography, aerial doings, laser-like strobe effects, and, oh yes, a clunky story vaguely written by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, who co-conceived this farrago with Chen Shi-Zheng, who stages it. Golly, where’s Fuerza Bruta when you really need it? The finale of Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise.
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