For instance, Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams's $650,000 stage doesn't have any sort of on-ramp, so when little Little Lotus and Doug Pince are pushing their twins in a pram around the perimeter, they have to lift it up several stairs to enter the playing space. It would have been nice to have Chen on hand to explain some of the more mind-boggling choices. Why is Lone Peak's daughter, Little Lotus (Jasmine Chiu as little Little Lotus PeiJu Chien-Pott as grown-up Little Lotus), so attracted to a white-haired German guy (David Torok as 'Doug Pince,' the only character granted a last name) that she not only misses his obvious nefariousness (the white hair and thick German accent are the deadest giveaways I've ever seen) but agrees to marry him six months into their relationship after she conceives twins? (Twinkling blue and pink LED light bulbs wrapped in towels represent these babies.) Then Doug Pince tries to kill one of the babies, leading to a second act straight out of The Comedy of Errors, but without the comedy. There are more questions than answers about this confusing story. To wit, who are the dragons, and who are the phoenixes? That's not a inquiry about the identity of the characters, but a literal request to be told backstory about these two rival martial arts factions who all live in that well-known, worldwide hub of martial arts, Flushing, Queens, where an elderly martial arts master named Lone Peak (David Patrick Kelly) is inexplicably the guardian of a magical pool of water, and - also inexplicably - refuses to entrust its care to Lee (Dickson Mibi), his successor whom he has been training for years. But why couldn't they have given us any context about the plot they constructed so we'd be able to follow the action? What prompted them to use the songs of pop singer Sia to underscore the action? Why is there no exposition to tell us anything about who these people are and why they're at odds? Director Chen Shi-Zheng is big in the opera world, and it's very clear from the mise-en-scène that he wants to channel that kind of grandeur. Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger (writers) are theater neophytes - their best-known property is the Kung Fu Panda film series.

Why didn't Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise make any sense? That's a question no one could answer except the creators.

Why did I go see Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise? Was it my desire to spend more time at the Shed, the new performance and art space at the Hudson Yards? Was it my morbid curiosity to see what a martial arts musical with the songs of Sia, by the writers of Kung Fu Panda, would look like? Or was it just a gross miscalculation on my part? What if it was all three? A scene from Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise at the Shed.

Dragon spring phoenix rise wiki