![]() ![]() The heroes, including Grandmaster Lone Peak (Broadway regular David Patrick Kelly) and his rebellious daughter Little Lotus (Martha Graham Dance Company's PeiJu Chien-Pott), are members of the House of Dragon, which has guarded the Dragon Spring for countless generations. Working with Poots and Chen, Aibel and Berger fashioned a tale that spans two decades and pits the forces of good against the forces of evil. "This takes place in modern-day New York." "The movies are more like family comedies in a mythic China in which animals speak," Aibel says. "But I don't know of any other." One thing it's not is a stage version of Kung Fu Panda. ![]() "I don't want to claim it as the first one," Poots says. While other stage extravaganzas have featured music and martial arts elements - Chen's own Monkey: Journey to the West comes to mind - Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise seems to be pioneering the kung fu musical genre, with an original story integrating songs by Australian pop star Sia with assistance from The Haxan Cloak. Poots has no such trouble: "I call it a kung fu musical." The only downside, Berger says, is "we don't know what to call it for friends and family." It could take elements of everything to be its own strange and crazy thing." So it didn't have to be a musical comedy or an opera or a Cirque du Soleil imitation. "I think because we don't have a traditional theatre background, that enabled us to approach it just saying, 'What do we want to see?,' without having to say what category it fits into. "It made for a lot of creative freedom in the process," Berger notes.Īibel agrees. Their uncertainty has been a good thing, they say. Now Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise is opening as the first big theatrical spectacle in The Shed's inaugural season - yet its two authors still aren't sure what it is. They had never written for flesh-and-blood actors on the stage before.īut Poots insisted the director, Chinese-American opera producer Chen Shi-Zheng, was interested in them. And moreover, why them? For the past 25 years, Aibel and Berger have worked primarily on animated TV shows ( King of the Hill) and movies ( Trolls, Aliens vs. "Is it a musical? Is it an opera? Is it fighting? Is it a comedy?" Aibel remembers wondering. Poots wanted them to write the script for a live stage show titled Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise, but they didn't understand what exactly it was supposed to be. The two screenwriters of the Kung Fu Panda movies, Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, were confused when they got a call several years ago from Alex Poots, the artistic director of The Shed, an arts center in New York that didn't yet exist. How Hollywood screenwriters worked with an international team to create Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise at The Shed
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