Chun Yi

A China Heaven Creation International Performing Arts Co. and Great World Artists International production. At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Sunday, January 8. No remaining performances

Billed as an innovative fusion of ballet, western theatrical techniques, and Chinese martial-arts prowess, Chun Yi: The Legend of Kung Fu is no such thing. Instead it's a gaudy spectacle of mammoth proportions but only moderate skill, marked by a numbingly banal story line, a score that'll have you longing for the emotional nuances of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and the worst fake beards since Planet of the Apes.

The plot, such as it is, is press-release simple: a young boy is abandoned by his mother into the care of a geriatric kung-fu master, who names his charge Chun Yi, or "The Pure One". Over the course of the next 15 years or so, this father figure-he of the long facial tresses-steers his student through the shoals of sexual desire while training him in the etiquette of the martial arts. The moral could be expressed like this: women bad, swords good. Many six-year-olds of my acquaintance might agree.

The kids in my aisle certainly enjoyed the kung-fu demonstrations, which took up three-quarters of this diversion's less-than-two-hour running time and culminated in an ouch-inspiring display of shaven-headed acrobats cracking iron bars across their skulls. Chun Yi, of course, excelled: he could smash three at a time while his colleagues mastered two at best.

Interestingly, though, I attended Chun Yi with a welder. Afterwards, as pintsize Shaolin monks rushed the merch table, she picked up one of the ferrous billets laid out for inspection. "Cast metal," she pronounced dismissively. They're made to break. Which is not to say that the stunt doesn't hurt; it's just not what it seems.

Much of this production is similarly pitched to the credulous eye. More skeptical viewers will undoubtedly notice the bendy swords, the safety harnesses that glitter in plain view during the aerial displays, and the little trolley that propels Chun Yi's now-deceased master across the heavens during the final scene. For that matter, they'll also twig to the '80s-style rock-video lighting effects, the dime-store props, and the flat-footed choreography.

It's hard to believe that this very expensive show, which boasts a top ticket price of $155, contains nothing but empty spectacle, yet Chun Yi is so intellectually vacant that it demands a furious search for subtext. Viewed as a statement, rather than an art object, Chun Yi seems a state-sanctioned riposte to western excess in the arts, and Hollywood in particular. In American movies and musicals, the good guy gets the girl through a combination of hedonism, egoism, and reckless bravado. In Chun Yi, the good guy meets the girl, they flirt, the girl is banished, and then the good guy gets the living shit beaten out of him for disobeying his leader-but he takes his punishment manfully, and is eventually named chairman of this all-male paradise.

In short, this production suggests that conformity, abstinence, piety, and the warrior spirit are the keys to a happy life-an odd and disturbing message for a supposedly modern and peaceful China to be sending the world.