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An Opera in Air and Silk San Francisco
War Memorial Opera House
11/14/2025 - & November 16, 18, 20, 22, 25, 28, 30, 2025
Huang Ruo: The Monkey King (World Premiere)
Mei Gui Zhang (Guanyin), Kang Wang (Money King), Jusung Gabriel Park (Master Subhuti, Budda), Joo Won Kang (Dragon King), Hongni Wu (Crab General, Venus Star), Konu Kim (Jade Emperor), Peixin Chen (Supreme Sage Laojun)
San Francisco Opera Chorus, John Keene (Chorus Director), San Francisco Opera Orchestra, Carolyn Kuan (Conductor)
Diane Paulus (Director), Basil Twist (Set and Puppetry Designer), Ann Yee (Choreographer), Ayumu Saegusa (Lighting Designer), Anita Yavich (Costume Designer), Hana S. Kim (Projection Designer)
(© Cory Weaver)
The Monkey King, by composer Huang Ruo and librettist David Henry Hwang, had its world premiere at San Francisco Opera on November 14. The production is spectacular—an imaginative fusion of Chinese opera’s distinctive makeup, masks, stylized singing, and gesture with the narrative and vocal traditions of Western opera. The work draws on the journey archetypes embedded in Mussorgsky, Vaughan Williams, and especially Wagner, yet The Monkey King feels like nothing you’ve seen or heard before.
Hwang and Huang Ruo are a proven team. Hwang has pared down and shaped the early chapters of the iconic Chinese tale into a tightly focused origin tale, while Huang Ruo opens new sonic worlds through his orchestration and vocal writing.
Huang Ruo often describes music as an experience with “length, width, and height.” You hear that idea from the opera’s first moments. An a cappella chorus begins so faintly it seems to arrive from a great distance. It swells into full force, passes us, and then recedes. Onstage, figures and objects often echo this movement—drifting in from afar, approaching, and slipping away in synchrony with the music.
The orchestral score seems to live in the air around us. A pulsing bass line in the percussion and strings anchors the sound; depth and height emerge in the booming tuba and the piccolo’s delicate sparkle. Martial rhythms give way to jazzy interludes; textures shift and shimmer.
Puppeteer Basil Twist extends these musical currents into the visual realm, using silks that throb in time with the orchestra’s beat. Carolyn Kuan, a frequent collaborator of Huang Ruo, conducts with both delicacy and fervor.
Chinese instruments such as the pipa (played by Shenshen Zhang) and a battery of Chinese and Indonesian gongs and cymbals blend with Western percussion—bass drum, glockenspiel, crotales (bowed and even “sucked”), wood blocks, chimes, slapsticks, thunder sheets. The driving bass, in particular, becomes a signature element. Twist’s undulating rivers and roads—sometimes inflated forms, sometimes simple floating silks—rise and fall, constantly in motion. They make the ear more alert to the music’s forward sweep. Nothing overwhelms anything else; forms coexist without collision.
The singing is superb. Huang Ruo, a singer himself, writes generously for the human voice. Bass Peixin Chen (the Supreme Sage Laojun) pairs a resonant, commanding tone with the stylized gestures of Chinese opera. Kang Wang as the Monkey King has a helden edge early on but soon expands into an impassioned lyricism; he, too, signals emotion beautifully with his hands. A floating teardrop moves across the stage in time with the music as soprano Mei Gui Zhang sings with brilliance. Mezzo Hongni Wu is irresistible.
Painted landscapes seem to come alive. Towering mountains shift colors and ultimately collapse into the Monkey King’s small hut. They are manipulated by puppeteers from within and below the stage. Video images slide across the backdrop, then sweep from upstage to downstage in waves.
Twist conjures multiple realms for the Monkey King’s travels. Silk stalactites and stalagmites create one world. Heaven hovers. Jellyfish drift by, their tentacles trailing. A bouquet blossoms into a garden reminiscent of Kundry’s. A giant peach is plucked from a kind of Edenic tree. Through these spaces moves the chorus—sometimes distant and ghostly, sometimes immediate and forceful—adding yet another dimension to the experience.
The Monkey King offers a classic operatic quest—an epic search for soul‑deep peace—but lifts it to a new level. Born from a rock like a comic-book hero and ending suspended like Brünnhilde awaiting the future, the Monkey King is also playful: a singing, dancing, flying trickster, split into triplets during the early parts of the story. The opera is genuinely fun.
With Twist’s silks enveloping the stage and Huang Ruo’s music filling every corner of the War Memorial Opera House, The Monkey King suggests a bold future for American opera—one rooted, as Huang Ruo says, in a “third culture” where traditions meet, move, and transform.
Susan Hall
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