Two years ago, the Hong Kong Arts Festival began commissioning local artists to create a musical about the young Sun Yat-sen. First, they brought composer Peter Kam on board, then director Eugene Ma, playwright Sunny Chan and lyricist Chris Shum joined the team, and the Yat-sen creative quartet began to take shape....

In 1947, two years after the end of World War II, Albert Camus’s second novel, La Peste (The Plague), was published in France. The story describes the devastation wrought by a fictional plague on the Algerian city of Oran. Its insights into humanity’s will to survive and the choices people make in the face of fear and death resonated with post-war readers....

Mature works of art go through a long process of nurturing: absorbing and accumulating nutrients over time, gradually developing before coming into full bloom. The first edition of the Hong Kong Jockey Club Contemporary Dance Series (CDS) was presented at the 40th Hong Kong Arts Festival in 2012, and this year marks its tenth edition....

Ivan Mercier takes a look at one of two adaptations of The Plague being presented at this year’s HKAF—a ground-breaking online version performed simultaneously by a cast in six countries around the world....

In 2010, just before they emigrated to the United States, Cantonese opera stars Man Chin-sui and Leung Siu-sum bid farewell to their Hong Kong fans with a production of Noah’s Ark. As both playwright and performer, Man drew from the biblical tale of the patriarch Noah and his construction of an ark to survive the great flood....