Rooted in Tradition, Driven by Innovation: Mao Weitao's Yue Opera Vision

Tickets for New Dragon Gate Inn's Taizhou stop sold out in just three minutes. Mao Weitao, Yue opera's only three-time Plum Blossom Award recipient, notes: “Fame fades; art endures.”

At 60, she revisited Huangyan's Jiufeng Ancient Houses for a national folk art event—30 years after she first paid homage to tradition there. Her career blends reverence and reform.

“Innovation is in Yue opera's DNA,” says Mao Weitao. Since the 1990s, she has been a devoted pioneer of change—bidding farewell to conventional happy endings with Lu You and Tang Wan, and deepening the Shaoxing dialect’s tonal richness in Kong Yiji.

Leading the Zhejiang Xiaobaihua Yue Opera Troupe, she fused Japanese aesthetics, Brecht, and Shakespeare, with New Dragon Gate Inn (scripted by post-95s Sun Yuxi) a hit. Yet she preserves core traditions: Oriental symbolism, Zhejiang dialect, all-female casts.

Mao nurtures talent via hybrid training (academy + apprenticeship). Now, the Troupe thrives, with protégés like Sun making waves.

Admiring Taizhou's opera culture, she premiered New Dragon Gate Inn's replica here, hoping youth see Yue opera as universal. For Mao, tradition fuels innovation—this is her legacy.