My view on 白蛇新傳

First The production is far NOT satisfactory. To be fair, the concept is meaningful and sounds promising. However, the main plot is not strong enough to support a 3 hours musical, sub-plot should be introduced where it hasn't. It results in a lot of hard jokes and meaningless plotline used to fill up the plot holes. Also, character building is weak.

Acting is good, music is fine,(though without memorable tune), but the directing is not good enough. It reminds me a lot of trash local movies of the 80's which also contain hard jokes and meaningless plotline and dialogues. (無厘頭 can be really funny and interesting, but this drama is running on the other side.) It tries to contain multi-cultural elements of HK environment, but clearly it lost its way by just being too greedy. As a result, the drama turns out to be chaotic and messy as well

Moreover, the set design is simply terrible(not to mention the Guanyin). I have no idea whether it is because of the budget constraint.

In the second scene of Act 1 when the Guomingtung is matching with the Communist Party to show the unification of the Chinese people, I should say it is nothing but superficial. It tries to demontrate its ambition of being a Les Miserable-typed of musical, but it fails. Obviously, Victor can't convince me when he told me his idea on this scene during the post-performance interview.

I watched the Girl from 1941 and The Border City, but i have to say this one is the worst among the three.

Without doubt , the musical did showcast the artistic talents of HK drama scene, but i don think it can represent HK. After the show, I heard comment from a foreigner who's an art editor of an english magazine. She said she expect the largest local production in HK artfest would be, simply better.

I don't have any expectation on this production prior watching, but i was disappointed after the show.

I urge the ArtFest to seriously evalue this production after the fest. Personally, i think Theatre Ensemble, Prospects Theatre or even W theatre would be a much better choice to represent HK in a relatively large-scaled drama production.