Review | Shark Symphony review: City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong’s fun, family-friendly musical about sustainability
- Shark Symphony features a dazzling range of diverse performances and spectacular costumes to tell a story based on sustainability and shark’s fin soup
- There is some imbalance between the musical’s two halves, which if addressed could have left more time to solve the story’s main conflict
Original musicals have become a key part of the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong’s programming. After Bug Symphony (2015) and Wild (2022), the orchestra premiered its third creation, Shark Symphony, at the Tsuen Wan Town Hall on April 20.
Written by Leanne Nicholls, the founder and artistic director of CCOHK, Shark Symphony has a strong sustainability theme.
Two businessmen, Ken and Michael (Perrin Pang and Michael Sharmon), have started an underwater restaurant called “The Deep”. Its selling point is sustainable seafood and spectacular underwater views. The major investor, Doris (Jessica Ng), has requested that her singer daughter Belle (Crisel Consunji) performs in the restaurant. Ken and Belle fall in love and decide to get married.
The scene where Ken and Michael introduce their dishes to Doris and the influential food critic Mrs Moore (Jacqueline Gourlay Grant) is more educational than funny, though the beauty parade of sea creatures that follows includes cleverly choreographed acrobatic and dance performances by lobsters, jellyfish and other animals that thrilled the crowd.
The costume and make-up (Nicholls and Aurora Corpus, respectively) are spectacular. The mysterious anglerfish, for example, sees performers wearing helmets in the shape of the deep-sea creature with lights for eyes, while the manta ray is brilliantly imitated by cyr wheel artist Zara Asa dressed in a sheer cape. The smooth, regular rhythm of the wheel truly brings to mind the flapping motion that manta rays make.
