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Edit | Yellow Moon
One night in August 1609, an Italian astronomer and physicist pointed his new telescope at the moon for the first time. He found that the moon was not as smooth as people thought, but rather potholed; Jupiter is surrounded by four moons orbiting it, rather than all the stars revolving around the Earth, as the Bible says. He then wrote the observation report into a thin pamphlet called the Interstellar Messenger. The scholar who, after Copernicus, once again challenged the geocentric theory "against the great disobedience of the world" was Galileo Galilei. Because of his heliocentric claims, he was imprisoned and punished by the Holy See.
In 1611, the German astronomer and physicist Kepler published Refractive Optics, proposing ways to improve the telescope and verifying Galileo's discovery. In Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Renaissance irresistibly promoted people from the "Middle Ages" to the "modern era", and Galileo and Kepler, who were at the critical point of change of the times, not only had the academic foundation laid by the medieval university system, but also stimulated curiosity and creativity by the new wave of information brought by the print media, ahead of the times and expanded the boundaries of human knowledge.
The musical The Interstellar Messenger brings the story of Galileo and Kepler to the stage. The story begins with a letter written by Kepler to Galileo. In 1616, Galileo was imprisoned for "propaganda heresy". Galileo asked his daughter Mary to immediately burn the letters hidden in his room, and at the same time, Mary received a series of letters, all of which had the same name, Kepler. Mary was very curious about the letterer, and she tried to find out why her father had become a "pagan" and his relationship with Kepler. Based on the imagination of real history, the playwright artistically restores the shock and confusion of scientists at the time of the new discoveries in astronomical science, and their fearless self-sacrifice in the pursuit of truth. In April 2019, "Star Courier" premiered at the Chungmuro Art Center in Seoul, and was re-performed twice in 2020, and was nominated for "Best Musical" at the Korean Musical Theater Awards in the same year.
From August 13 to 21, the Chinese version of the musical "Interstellar Messenger" premiered at the Shanghai Theater. The performance of the play also marks the official end of the "Performing Arts World - 2022 Shanghai International Musical Theatre Festival".
Before the official premiere, the musical "Interstellar Messenger" presented four wonderful clips at the media event on the 12th, "No Solution", "Reproduction of Shimmer", "Indelible Imprint" and "Interstellar Messenger". Subsequently, Fei Yuanhong, artistic producer of the play and deputy general manager of Shanghai Culture Square, producer Yu Yimiao and others shared the creation story of the play.
Fei Yuanhong said that scientist-themed musicals are unprecedented on the Chinese stage and very rare on a global scale, and we may think that the story of "exploring scientific truths" will be very serious, even divorced from real life. But the creators of "Interstellar Messenger" are well versed in the methods of musical theater, "the more serious the subject matter, sometimes the more relaxed words to speak, in order to set off its seriousness." 」 One of the characteristics of the play that he commented was that the characters were very vivid, such as Galileo galilei, who was a great scientist who adhered to academic ideals and defended scientific truths, but also a normal person with his own joys and sorrows and careful machines, who would pay tribute to the Medici family in order to win research funds.
In terms of artistic quality, Fei Yuanhong believes that "it is very guaranteed", he told such a detail - although "Interstellar Messenger" is a small theater drama, the stage design is very exquisite, and there are more than 300 lighting effect prompts alone, more than the musical "Notre Dame de Paris".
The rehearsal of "Interstellar Messenger" has experienced many twists and turns due to the epidemic in Shanghai. Most of the crew spent 17 days in a closed-loop training session on the third basement floor of the Theater in The Cultural Square, and Fei Yuanhong humorously said that only the "Phantom of the Theater" would live under the theater, "but even the Phantoms would not appear in groups like this... I believe that their efforts can be seen by the audience during the official performance. ”
Because Galileo and Kepler did not see each other in the play, the dialogue between the two never unfolded in real space, and in order to show the scene where the two seemed to talk to each other in the universe of dreams, the stage design had many ingenuity. Yu Yimiao introduced that the center of the stage is an inclined circular stage, symbolizing the judgment in the Bible that the movement of celestial bodies is perfectly round, and outside the center stage of the perfect circle is a large oval stage, symbolizing kepler's law, and the movement of celestial bodies follows an elliptical orbit. The floor at the front of the stage is painted with the Zodiac, and the multimedia screen behind the stage will change as the plot progresses, as if it were the eyes of a scientist looking up at the stars. In addition, there will be hidden surprises above the auditorium waiting for the audience to discover and obtain an immersive "cosmic romance".