Hong Kong Ballet The Butterfly Lovers Review
August 22, 2025 | David H. Koch Theater – New York, NY, USA
The Butterfly Lovers is one of China’s most influential folklore legends, dating back to the Jin Dynasty, and often compared to Romeo and Juliet. The reference rings true in terms of tragedy and communication gone wrong.
The legend centers on a rich daughter, Zhu Yingtai, who convinces her parents to enroll her in an all male Confucian school where she falls in love with a classmate, Liang Shanbo, to whom she reveals her disguise. Years pass and Zhu’s mother writes that she is ill and must come home.
Upon her return, she discovers this was a lie to entrap her in an arranged marriage. Liang realizes he must be with Zhu and intends to propose. During an attempted elopement, Liang is beaten and killed by a group of guards.
Overwhelmed with grief, and a shell of herself, Zhu agrees to the arranged marriage but on the way to the wedding, she stops by Liang’s grave. After a desperate wish to be reunited, his grave opens in front of her and she leaps in. The couple transform into butterflies, united in eternity.
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Hong Kong Ballet The Butterfly Lovers Review
However, these critical narrative details were absent in Hong Kong Ballet’s rendition by resident choreographer Hu Song Wei Ricky.
The letter from Zhu’s mother for instance was delivered to Liang rather than her. If you did not browse the synopsis beforehand – which I needed to after Act 1 – you might assume the letter was for him. Nor could we tell who the letter was from which could easily have been remedied with a spotlight on the mother, sick and writing to her daughter.
I recognize it is unfair to fully compare The Butterfly Lovers to the impact of Romeo and Juliet. With never-ending renditions from movies to stages to musicals, most people need not have read Shakespeare’s play to know the plot. But at the very least we can glean from it the importance of building tension around delicate tipping points.
Without understanding Zhu’s reason for disguising herself as a man or the purpose of the letter, the story becomes muddy, and our empathy for the doomed lovers diminished.
There was ample opportunity for storytelling against a dynamic original score by Tian Mi but instead of story-building we were inundated with synchronized group work which fell flat.
The exception being the “Etiquette” section which featured a more traditional Chinese fan dance. The angular elbows and near slow motion walking made for a hypnotic meditative airiness.
Also in the “Battle of Men” section where Liang meets his untimely death, the group dancing is more effective as it leans away from mundane classical ballet and into textured contemporary shapes, canons, and intricate floor patterns that see the dancers weaving across the stage rather than remaining in a static clump.
Hu’s contemporary language was especially missed in the pas de deux. Repetitive and simple ballet steps diluted what should have been heights of passion. We did see blips of ingenuity in the complex, flipping and twisting lifts, but the thrills they offered were too few and far between.
Xuan Cheng and Ma Renjie, who danced Zhu and Liang respectively, are compelling performers with great chemistry, especially in the bed scene, where Tim Yip’s clever set design upended the bed vertically.
Costumes, also by Yip, were lush and captivating, particularly Zhu’s ceremonial wedding gown and the terrifying long-necked ghosts, whose appearance was strange to say the least, yet preferable to blandness.
In what should have been the emotional culmination, a sublime butterfly reveal, we return instead to more laurel-resting group work (why?), with no butterflies in sight. The confetti-strewn empty stage felt anticlimactic, a puzzling end.
Featured Photo of Hong Kong Ballet Dancers Garry Corpuz and Xuan Cheng in Hu Song Wei Ricky’s The Butterfly Lovers. Photo by Rosalie O’Connor. Courtesy of Hong Kong Ballet.
I like your review on the technicality of the dance. I would like to provide my interpretation of the ending and hope this helps. The finale departed from tradition. Instead of ending with two butterflies symbolizing eternal union, the Hong Kong Ballet chose a subtler metaphor. Two larva-like creatures emerged, representing not just the souls of Zhu and Liang, but the idea of new beginnings. It was a choice that replaced closure with continuation, evoking the cycles of reincarnation.The use of a body slide—with dancers gliding from a dancer-formed tunnel in skin-toned costumes—reminded the audience that we enter and leave this world stripped of possessions, yet never stripped of spirit. The transition between lives was portrayed not as an end, but as an ongoing flow.