Shakespearean Drama re-imagined as Peking Opera?

Yeah...so I was at my parents' house last night, channel-surfing, and caught this somewhat grotesque but nonetheless very interesting...chimera playing on one of the CCTV stations. (My mum, btw, like many bored overseas Chinese tai-tais, spends half the day parked in front of the telly with her favourite Chinese melodramas.)

It was"Hamlet", and it was performed by the Shanghai Peking Opera Troupe, and I caught it right at the "alas, poor Yorick!" scene. My impressions: basically, they butchered the script almost beyond recognition (reducing the Bard's sublime language to clunky and pedestrian quasi-antiquated sung verse), but I was intrigued by the concept - especially the incorporation of all the conventions and stylized tropes standard to the Peking opera genre. Given that it was Hamlet after all, I felt that the play itself was also a little unsuitable for Peking opera (which has always been quite gaudy), and that one of Shakespeare's comedies would have worked better. (I'd love to see the play done in the much more austere Kun or even Japanese Noh form, however.)

So...has anyone here seen it? Or others of its type (you know, postmodernist pastiches of East-Meets-West)? What do y'all think of them? Brilliant and innovative? Ugly and monstrous? :wink: