Beijing Goes NoBrow for Olympic Opening Ceremony

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August 8, 1:56 AM

by Dominic Patten, Pop Culture Examiner

 

 

I KNOW JACK SPARROW, MS. BRIGHTMAN, AND YOU ARE NO JACK SPARROW

After all the bidding, building, torch carrying, arrests, and hand wringing, the Beijing Olympics is about to kick off early Friday morning.

The opening salvo is a star studded and illuminated Ceremony featuring more than 20,000 performers and 30,000 fireworks.

This is a very important party for China's rulers and for the world. This is the coming out party for the People's Republic of China as a global superpower. It will in a single performance hope to display how far China has come since Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong reached over the Great Wall in 1972 and ended the Middle Kingdom's decades long isolation. Today, the communist ruled but hyper capitalistic run nation has unparallel economic and increasingly cultural depth and reach.

But, as the Chinese expression says, each journey starts with a small step, and the internationally televised Opening Ceremony, that will be broadcast at 7AM EST, is about to put its foot down in a big pile of crap.

It's hot, the skies may be hazy and rain is expected but no one can do big like the People's Republic of China. They've tried to, as the PRC does, keep the proceedings under more wraps than Mao's mausoleum. And though some footage has leaked of rehearsals of ribbon dancing and other performance, it was quickly removed from YouTube.

TAKE A LOOK HERE FOR AT A REHEARSAL OF THE BEIJING OLYMPICS' OPENING CEREMONY FROM SOUTH KOREAN TV.

President Jintao, President Bush and 78 other heads of states will be there in the "bird's nest" national stadium. With reports of a terrorist threat and online videos showing a burning Olympic logo, security is tight, but the Games must go on.

Unfortunately, no one can do star bookings like the PRC either. Sure Steven Spielberg quit as artistic director in February over China's support for the government of the Sudan, but Zhang Yimou, who directed films like Raise the Red Lantern and Hero has been overseeing the whole thing for the past two years. Prominent Chinese performers like composer Tan Dun, artist Cai Guo-Qiang, choreographer Shen Wei and acclaimed pianist Lang Lang are scheduled to appear. 

This should be China's reach for the stars, so to speak.

So, with the wealth of talent the world has to offer, who gets pluck to appear with pop star Liu Huan as the sole international performer at the Opening Ceremonies?

Sarah Brightman.

That's right. Sarah Brightman.

Now perhaps you know her as the world's best selling soprano or from her performance of “Amigos Para Siempre” at the Closing Ceremony of the Barcelona Olympics in 1992.

Perhaps you even know her for her performance at the Opening Ceremony of the 2007 World Championship in Athletics, which doesn't speak well for the originality of Beijing.

But I bet you know the ex-wife of composer and reality TV judge Andrew Lloyd Webber as the star of the widely popular but horrific Phantom of the Opera.

Sarah Brightman isn't high brow or low brow, she's NoBrow. She is the big pile of crap you step into if you play safe with the aesthetic of these politically charged megaevents.

Having her as your star turn assures, without a firework lit or a note sung, that the Opening Ceremony in Beijing is going to be a dud - just like all the eminently forgettable ones before it.

Next year, all the sports, like sumo wrestling and the tug'o'war, that don't get to be in the Olympics will take to the field in Taiwan, mainland China's lost jewel in the crown, at the World Games.

Even if they hired Michael "Lord of the Dance" Flatley and his silly headband, they couldn't do worse than Sarah Brightman.

Sarah Brightman?

No one, not even an authoritarian regime, should misstep so badly.

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