They are slapped on with a "go with it" attitude to fill in for character monologues when the show can't lean on silence to tell the story. (When you leave the theatre and keep hearing plenty of people say "I thought they died, how are they alive?", that's not a good sign.) With only four songs listed, Sia's musical numbers don't align with the narrative momentum. But the visuals are so ambiguous that their new living status does not register for Act II. For example, the supposed water funeral of two characters and their resurrection is wondrous to behold, as they are lowered onto the center, then ascended into the air, as if floating to heaven or floating in water. But its atmospheric ambiguity also works against it. I was hypnotized by its opening and a procession sequence that closed Act I. The production does soar when it occupies itself in the wordless mysticism, particularly in ritualistic sequences trusting in patience. But humoring its tropes does not compensate for a lack of substance, nor does its performers deliver their dialogue with conviction most of the time. When the master cries the cliché, "You were like a son to me," his betrayer mockingly repeats it. In the hands of the Kung Fu Panda movie writers, some script bits rake in laughs by poking fun at formula. But the clichés of "destiny" and "prophecy" grate. The musical wants to own its tropes, the same way any opera, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller movies, and Baz Luhrmann's visually saturated Moulin Rogue (now on Broadway) shamelessly take their heightened tropes in stride. The muddled mythology of Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise befuddles. Think of Ka, a famously plot-driven Cirque du Soleil show where its coming-of-age narrative is only a device for elegant spectacle and immersion that elevates familiar story beats. Trope-errific plots and blatant archetypes shouldn't be a problem. Even the provided program barely aids the viewer through the puzzling plot. Little Lotus and her baby supposedly die but are alive in the next act to confront the ramifications of the events and retrieve the missing twin brother. The father strangles his newborn daughter and steals away with the son. But it turns out the twins' father was in cohorts with the Grandmaster's apprentice to unlock immortality by murdering one of the babies (just go with it). She splits from her father to marry the suitor and bears him fraternal twins, daughter and son (Jasmine Chiu and Ji Tuo). While nightclubbing, she is courted by a moneyed lad who seems amiable. Little Lotus (PeiJu Chien-Pott) is the daughter of Grandmaster Lone Peak ( David Patrick Kelly ), who runs a secret sect in Queens, New York. On a $650,000 stage designed by Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams (whose Broadway credits include My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof, King and I ), not much happens despite a lot happening. It has creative parentage in Chinese opera and film director Chen Shi-Zheng ( Dark Matter ) and Kung Fu Panda writers Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, with Sia as the songwriter. Touted in ads as a "futuristic kung fu musical", Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise is an imaginative premature hatchling at its world premiere at The Shed in Manhattan Hudson Yard.
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