San Francisco — San Francisco Opera’s hit new opera, Huang Ruo’s “The Monkey King,” which had its final performance Sunday at War Memorial Opera House, quickly became the hottest show in town, all its performances sold out. It was the talk of the town, an opera with a little something for everyone, an opera that that stands for something culturally, spiritually and ethically. It operates at the intersections of pop art and high-ish art, of the sacred and profane, of radicalism and die-hardism. It is fittingly multicultural for a multicultural city. It invites you to leave the theater feeling better about the world.
Yet what makes this potentially the most important new opera of the year is not Huang’s agreeably efficient — and once in a while inspired — score, which incorporates Western and traditional music. Nor is it David Henry Hwang’s user-friendly libretto based on the late Ming Dynasty Chinese classic, “Journey to the West.” The potential this opera signals is for a major cultural change for San Francisco.
In the green room of the opera house at the Nov. 20 performance, founder and CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, and his wife, Lori Huang, announced a $5-million gift to San Francisco Opera to help fund the production of the “Monkey King,” which the company commissioned, and a commitment to continue an annual $5 million contribution to the company. That may seem like pocket change for Nvidia, having three weeks earlier became the first company in the world valued at $5 trillion (which is 1 million times $5 million). But one small step for a chip maker is a big leap for opera and Silicon Valley, where arts philanthropy has not been a meaningful priority.
San Francisco Opera well set the stage for this by going all out in connecting “Monkey King” with the city’s large Chinese community through various outreach programs while also tapping into the way Chinese culture has long been a pervasive influence, and especially through music, in San Francisco life.
Early in the century the composers Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison regularly visited productions of Peking Opera, which is — like “Journey to West” — an innovation of 17th century China and still regularly revived. It was thanks in significant part to Cowell that we came to have the genre we call world music. Harrison then made California a principal originator of the hybridization of Eastern and Western music.
San Francisco Opera was late to the game (it has yet to stage a Harrison opera) but the company was a pioneer in the fusing of jazz and opera with Gunther Schuller’s “The Visitation” in 1967. In 2016, the company gave the premiere of Bright Sheng’s “Dream of the Red Chamber,” which is, like “Monkey,” based on a classic Chinese novel and has a libretto by Hwang.
“Red Chamber” proved successful enough for a rare revival in 2022, but it never became the kind of sensation that “Monkey” boasts. “Monkey” forgoes the more integral hybridization, finding sensation in piling on as much on as possible.
The plot basically sticks to the first seven chapters of the 100-chapter novel, which concerns an engagingly impulsive monkey who obtains superpowers and, to protect his monkey community, enjoys one wily adventure after another. But by getting away with anything, Monkey’s ego grows. He often doesn’t think of others and does what he wants, often without caring about consequences. After going through endless battles and conflicts in his journeys with a Buddhist monk (fodder for animated series, comics, films, television serials, Chinese operas and a celebrated rock opera by Damon Albarn), Monkey ultimately finds enlightenment.
In Diane Paulus’ production for San Francisco, Monkey is portrayed by an opera singer, an acrobatic dancer and a puppet. The stars of the show become more than the performers, who are all capable of spectacle, but also Basil Twist, he of the puppetry and fantastical sets, and choreographer Ann Yee. Huang’s previous chamber opera, “Book of Mountain and Seas,” which L.A. Opera, in collaboration with Beth Morrison Productions, staged last year, was also made magical by Twist.
Each of the new opera’s five scenes in Act 1 and three in Act 2 are wondrous worlds of their own. Monkey is born from a stone. Seeking eternal life, he learns the secret of 72 Transformations from a venerated Buddhist teacher and then becomes an irreverent show-off. After tricking a Dragon King, Monkey heads to Heaven, where he wreaks havoc with the Jade Emperor, gobbles down precious 9,000-year-old magical peaches and gives himself the title, as vainglorious leader of the Monkey kingdom, of “The Great Sage, Equal to Heaven.”
Buddha steps in, imprisoning Monkey under a mountain and forcing him to study sutras for 500 years. In the novel, the journey then begins. In the opera, Monkey goes straight to the Land of the Bliss in a scene of operatic magnificence.
That magnificence overpowers everything that went before it, which includes fabulous dance, arresting puppetry and outstanding singing actors, including Kang Wang, as Monkey, an impressive juggler in his own right.
Huang’s score is all over the map. The libretto is mostly in vernacular English, except for choral interjections of the Buddhist “Diamond Sutra,” sung in Chinese. Those chants are beauteous, as is the music for the Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin (soprano Mei Gui Zhang) and, making his appearance at opera’s end, Buddha (bass-baritone Jusung Gabriel Park).
Most of Huang’s vocal writing, to suit the text, is conversational; half the time he has prepared you to predict what note comes next. The orchestra, adroitly conducted by Carolyn Kuan, includes Chinese instruments as well Western, but it is the Chinese ones that bring life to the score. Monkey’s capture comes about by his being believably beguiled by the sound of the lute-like pipa.
The scene of Bliss that comes out of nowhere, with Buddha and Guanyin in Heaven above a sutra-chastened Monkey, is where Huang’s music becomes inspired. Power alone is not enough, Monkey has learned. Only having given up ego and all attachments has he obtained the heart of compassion. Joy emanates in sight, sound and movement.
On a transformational opera stage, Huang and Hwang send a message to another Huang, and one of the most powerful people in the world: “Power is not enough.”
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