Chinatown Opera Theater in North America

In some ways, Nancy Yunhwa Rao’s Chinatown Opera Theater in North America is the quintessential response to Yu’s call, for there is little doubt that the defining tunes of the Chinese diaspora in the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth were, in the most literal sense, those of the Cantonese opera. With her detailed study of the second “golden age” of Chinatown theaters—the 1920s—in North America, Rao adds to recent English-language work on Cantonese opera as a transnational art form and business, and she does so in a way that draws on an impressive variety of sources, many of them featuring thespians, their promoters, and their fans in their own words and voices. From Chinatown newspaper write-ups to playbills to sound recordings, the reader is afforded a glimpse of a complex web of commercial interests and theatrical rivalries at the very heart of the Chinese immigrant experience. Much of Rao’s contribution stems from her articulation of the important role of Cantonese opera in Chinatown communities in the 1920s, her aim being to “release these theaters from their repressed silence and perpetual invisibility, as well as separate them from the myths about them” (p. 9). Chief among these myths are the notions of marginality—of actors just passing through, of theaters’ questionable moral standing, of Chinese opera in the American musical imaginary—and fixity —of an unchanging repertoire and performance practice divorced from the geopolitical realities and dominant aesthetic trends of the day. By contrast, Rao “consider [s] Chinatown theaters to be dynamic, rather than timeless” (p. 12), wherein their dynamism is borne of commercial, cultural, and civic engagement, not isolation. Specifically, Rao argues that Chinatown opera theaters were influenced by five key factors: