Pupper power

It would be easy to label this production troubled: songs which, although beautiful in Chinese, did not translate smoothly into English; Chinese actors refusing to wear costumes they saw as inappropriate; even a controversy that led to a Chinese government directive to change the ending.

Yet to do so would be to undermine the importance of Cho Cho, a production that director Peter Wilson says is not only the first musical drama presented in both Chinese and English, but a metaphor for relations between East and West, for imperialist oppression of China, and the emergence of its new and co-operative relations with other nations.

"It was one of the most challenging works I have ever done," he says of this new music theatre production, incorporating puppets and based on Puccini's tragic Madame Butterfly. The show has runs planned in Sydney next week and then Melbourne the week after. "Its challenges lay at the very core of the bilingual aspect of the play."

It is the story of a young woman (Cio-Cio San in the original opera) longing for the return of Pinkerton, her American naval officer lover and the father of her child. Madame Butterfly was set in Japan, but Cho Cho relocates the story to 1930s Shanghai with Cho Cho a 15-year-old Chinese girl.

"The creation of the work is very much about the differences that exist in the story, between the Australians and the Chinese, the American and the Chinese, the destruction of the East by American imperialism and about misunderstandings of culture and unknowns and betrayal. It is very much about how our relationships work," says Wilson, an Australian whose credits include founding Handspan puppetry theatre in Melbourne in 1977, directing segments of the Sydney Olympics opening ceremony in 2000, and now creating a show for Apec (the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum) in Bali.

The production, which has surtitles, stars Australian musical theatre's Scott Irwin as Pinkerton, David Whitney and Danielle Barnes Irwin, with Chinese pop singer and actress Wang Zheng as Cho Cho, and Chinese musical veterans Dong Wenliang and Du He.