Ming Hwa Yuan and Takarazuka explore how stars are made

Ming Hwa Yuan Theatre is bringing together Taiwanese opera and former Takarazuka stars for a stage exchange designed to examine how leading performers are trained and renewed.

Founded in 1929, the Taiwanese troupe is now preparing for its third-generation succession. Chen Chao-hsien, the daughter of celebrated performer Sun Tsui-feng, had once been considered a possible successor to Sun’s famous male-role persona. After earning a master’s degree in arts administration, however, Chen became the troupe’s chief executive in 2018 and turned to management and long-term planning.

Chen had often pointed to Japan’s Takarazuka Revue as a model, especially its system of multiple companies and principal performers. After learning more about the organisation, she acknowledged that Taiwan’s industry is too small for Ming Hwa Yuan to reproduce the system on its own. She nevertheless admired Takarazuka’s polished production pipeline and proposed a three-year exchange programme.

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It is almost impossible for Ming Hwa Yuan to do this alone, given the current scale of Taiwan’s industry.

The first event, “Path to Excellence,” will bring former Takarazuka stars Kurenai Yuzuki and Airi Kizaki together with Sun and Chen as demonstration instructors. Former Takarazuka performer Yuki Nakahara, who now works in Taiwan, helped arrange the exchange and studied Ming Hwa Yuan’s history and practice.

Nakahara said Sun’s decades-long popularity as the troupe’s “Invincible Young Man” was remarkable. In Takarazuka, performers must train for years to become principal male or female leads, and their time at the top usually lasts only a few years to make room for succession and preserve freshness for audiences. The exchange will ask what happens when that star-making system meets the deep physical memory of traditional opera.

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It is incredible that Sun Tsui-feng has maintained the audience’s support as the Invincible Young Man for decades.