by CHEN Wei-ren

SAKURAI Koji is not just a musician. He enjoys cooking and making desserts at home in his free time; he's also known for pronouncing the Chinese word for "like" (xihuan) in the cute way (xifan)! This Mid-Autumn Festival at Weiwuying, he will present the musical Deep Lake Man. For this endeavor, he has chosen CHENG Yung-san as director and screenwriter. Having worked together for so many years, the two have great rapport and spur each other’s creativity. In addition, they are using the most advanced sound technology to give the audience a bold yet carefully planned feast for the ears!

Deep Lake Man is a musical adaptation of the Qing-dynasty writer PU Song-ling's "WANG Liulang," a short story in the book Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. For SAKURAI, who loves folk stories and history, producing the musical was something he was bound to do sooner or later. Actually, he began it at the request of LIEN Fang-pei to create a choral piece from Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. When he read "WANG Liulang," SAKURAI suddenly had a mental image of the old fisherman drinking and fishing by the water's edge, and he was deeply touched by the sentiment between the fisherman and the ghost and by the fisherman's kindness. SAKURAI turned it into an a cappella choral piece, later expanding it into a musical. To fit the setting and characters to the scale and structure of a stage performance, CHENG made the story more complete by adding in such characters as the fisherman's wife and a daffodil fairy, enhancing the emotional aspect and enriching the plot.

Besides augmenting the reality of the characters and the storyline, the production is also unique in its sound aspect. To create a completely immersive audio experience, SAKURAI is working with Topsound for the first time at a performance venue in bringing viewers the d&b Soundscape system. Viewers will be given a blindfold to wear to focus on the sound to make the experience more vivid and captivating. By letting sound direct the experience, the audience may perhaps learn to be more sensitive to sound in their everyday lives.

For SAKURAI, music is a grammar through which he expresses his innermost feelings and relates all kinds of stories. He demonstrates this grammar to its fullest through his adept, precise soundscape design and orchestration, giving the audience surprise after surprise. Upon talking about the rest of this year and the future, he said that besides looking forward to the situation with Covid improving soon, he hopes Deep Lake Man will go off smoothly.

In closing, he said, "I hope I will always be able to make great music for people and that my name will be equated with a guarantee of quality!"

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Storytelling Concert Deep Lake Man