Terracotta Warriors

Written, directed and produced

by Dennis K. Law

At The Centre in Vancouver

for the Performing Arts

Rating: *½

When a thunderstorm raging outside elicits more gasps of amazement than the action-musical limping along inside, most directors wouldn't need a critic to tell them the show is a flop.

Dennis Law, however, is a different story. The Denver-based surgeon and arts producer has been steadfastly determined to do things his way ever since his family purchased Garth Drabinsky's former Ford Centre three years ago, renamed it The Centre in Vancouver for the Performing Arts, and tried to breathe new life into the long-dormant theatre by turning it into a launching pad for a new genre of self-produced Asian stage shows.

Terracotta Warriors, which premiered Tuesday night, is his latest endeavour. Law, who is credited with writing, producing and directing, has sunk $3-million of his own money into this hybrid form of musical theatre that tells the story of China's first emperor, Quin Shihuang.

For the last two years in Beijing, a small army of performers, set decorators, costumers and hairdressers has been busy building the production, which will tour to Toronto and Denver. With a cast of 90 performers, which includes 15 members of the Pierre Cardin Martial Arts Troupe, plus opera singers, musicians and dancers from the China National Opera and Dance Company, the scale of the production is truly impressive and probably would have cost double that if it had been built in Canada.

The problem, however - and it's a big one - is that although this emperor has quite gorgeous clothes, he has no direction. All the on-stage elements for a successful show are there, but Law obviously doesn't have the experience to pull it together behind the scenes and he hasn't handed the reins over to anyone else who might. The overall effect is painfully amateur.

The wincing began even before the curtain was raised, when costumed performers were seen milling about the theatre seats before the show. Mingling with the audience is an absolute no-no in most professional theatres, unless the production somehow calls for it.

The story of the emperor's rise and defeat, told through the eyes of his conniving eunuch, calls for 20 stage sets. Unfortunately, they're not very well layered and take a long time to move. To fill the empty pauses, which last up to three minutes, Law has positioned two musicians on the floor to the right of the stage. The music is lovely, but all sense of dramatic momentum is lost with the constant interruptions. Especially when the audience can hear the stagehands banging around behind the curtains as they haul the lavishly painted backdrops and huge statues into the wings.

The soprano who periodically appears on the left of the stage is much more thoughtfully woven in. Chen Xoiaoduo sings seven songs in Mandarin throughout the show, accompanying the secondary story of two lovers, who enact their ill-fated romance through pas de deux. But even these otherwise graceful moments came crashing down when speakers on the theatre's highly touted 5.1 Digital Dolby Surroundsound kept hissing, popping and sometimes even cutting out. A similar technical problem all but destroyed Hao Weiya's original canned orchestral score.

Even with the high-school clunkiness, Terracotta Warriors is still a vast improvement on Law's first action-musical. Of Heaven and Earth, which premiered at the Centre two years ago, was a thinly written excuse for a circus - all action, no theatre. At least this show has a story that strings the dancing and tumbling together.

Zhang Jiaming has done a fine job of choreographing the fight scenes, with all their whip-snapping and knife-slashing. And the elaborate brocaded costumes - more than 300 in all - shimmer and shine.

But when it takes a full minute for the lights to come on at the end of the performance and the audience is left stumbling around in the dark, no amount of whistles, bells or smoke machines will make up for such sloppiness.

It's hard to figure out what Law's motives are in Vancouver. Is he an artistic visionary who truly believes there is a Broadway-bound future in his action-musicals? Or is he just a wannabe director with lots of money and a big theatre to play in?

If Law is serious about introducing Western audiences to a new form of musical theatre, as he says he is, his production values have got to be a lot better than this. And even if it's just a vanity project, he really should get some professional help before he embarrasses himself any further.

Terracotta Warriors continues at The Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts until May 30. It will run at Toronto's Elgin Theatre from June 8-27.