Broadway actor Wang Luoyong (L) and mainland actress Yuan Quan in the new adaptation of Jane Eyre. [China Daily]

After performing a dozen TV series in the last eight years, Wang Luoyong, the first Asian actor to land a lead role on Broadway, returns to the stage this week as Rochester in Jane Eyre at the National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA).

Wang's last stage role was the lead in the Chinese drama Kong Yiji at the Beijing People's Art Theater in 2001. Wang Xiaoying, director of Jane Eyre, commented: "Luoyong as the title role is the only actor that shines. He alone commands the stage."

The current production, which will be staged from June 19 to 28, is the result of a deal between the two Wangs a decade ago. In 1998, the director was doing research on Broadway and went to see the musical Miss Saigon in which the actor Wang had the lead role of the Engineer. Impressed by Wang's performance, the director went backstage and told him: "Luoyong, some day when you return Beijing, we should do a play together."

After appearing for a record 2,500 times in Miss Saigon, Wang Luoyong returned to China in 2002 and turned away from the stage to venture into the country's flourishing movie and TV industries.

The director Wang never forgot their conversation, however, and when the NCPA commissioned him to do Jane Eyre early this year, he believed Wang Luoyong would make a perfect Mr Rochester. He sent him the script and was delighted to get his immediate approval.

"As an actor, I really like the stage," says Wang Luoyong. "You continuously finish a drama in one breath and get the audience's response the next. When director Wang called me to do Jane Eyre, I was hesitant. I doubted whether today's audiences would be interested in such an old story. I was also not sure whether a Chinese adaptation of an English classic would be good.

"Although Charlotte Bronte wrote the novel in the 1840s, many of its themes, such as the morality, discrimination of the social class and gender relations still matter today. You hear many stories of conditional love, especially in China. Women unconsciously or substantially still depend on men's success."

Wang's Rochester has a strong physique and great wealth. His face is plain and his moods are prone to frequent change. He impetuously falls madly in love with Jane (played by Yuan Quan) because her simplicity, bluntness, intellectual capacity and plainness are in such contrast with the shallow society women he usually meets.

"Luoyong is really a good actor. His eyes, body, facial expressions, small actions and big movements, are all so dramatic," says director Wang. "His early solid basic acting training and the discipline and versatile skills and quick responses he got from Broadway, help him to both excel in the character and teach our young actors in rehearsals."

Wang's early training dates back to the early 1970s when the 11-year-old learned Peking Opera at Shiyan, in central China's Hubei province. After eight years, he rose to be a talented Peking Opera actor in a local troupe but then decided to develop his interest in music. He learned to play the French horn and harmonica and was admitted to the Wuhan Conservatory of Music.

His destiny as an actor had already been cast, however, and it was while at the Conservatory that he fell in love with Shakespeare after reading Othello and Hamlet. When he saw Laurence Olivier's Oscar-winning 1948 film version of Hamlet he was fascinated by the line "To be or not to be" and resolved to return to acting. Wang entered the Shanghai Academy of Drama as soon as he graduated from the conservatory in 1982.

While studying there, an American actor visited and told the students how Broadway shows sometimes ran hundreds of times over many years. "Hundreds of times in years! At that time, most plays in China ran for less than 10 nights. I was amazed and thought I had to try it," Wang recalls.

He applied to enroll at a theater-training program at Louisiana State University in the summer of 1987 and was asked to record a monologue. Speaking poor English, Wang recited "To be or not to be" in Chinese but had it returned. "No, no, we need English," came the reply.

Wang had a friend, a make-up artist, who offered to record the speech in English for him. He did and Wang duly got into the college, only to be kicked out a few weeks later.

Luckily, the depressed young man got help from Kristin Linklater, the renowned Scottish vocal coach and acting teacher. She offered him a position as an assistant physical trainer at her Shakespeare theater company and also recommended him to the vocal teacher Bob Chaplin.

Chaplin's way of improving Wang's English was eccentric, to say the least. He asked Wang to chew on a wine bottle cork to practice the correct pronunciation. It somehow did the trick, though, and after a year of painful and intensive training, 30-year-old Wang was able to speak English fluently.

Now he breezed through an oral English test and was admitted by Boston University's drama school, where he got a Master's degree. He stayed on as a faculty member at Boston University but never gave up on his dream to be an actor. Over the next few years, he landed several meaty roles, including M.Butterfly with the Seattle Repertory Company in 1991 and The Woman Warrior with the Doolittle Theater in Los Angeles in 1994 and 1995.

In 1989, after watching Miss Saigon on Broadway, Wang went backstage and knocked on producer Cameron Mackintosh's door.

At first, the famous Brit thought he was from a Chinese travel agency and had come to give him his air ticket to China. "No," said Wang, "I'd like a job please", and proceeded to perform some bodily movements, finishing with a rather unique version of Elvis Presley's Love Me Tender. Mackintosh couldn't help but be amused by a rendition totally different from the style of Miss Saigon - but he remembered the Chinese actor.

In the following two years, Wang got eight auditions and finally landed the role of Engineer, first in a tour from 1991 to 1993, then on Broadway from 1994 to 2001.

Having fulfilled his dream of appearing on Broadway and being hailed as a critically acclaimed actor in both the US and China, Wang began teaching acting at school. This September, he will start a musical program at Shanghai Academy of Drama.

(China Daily June 16, 2009)