Marxist masterpiece hitting the Chinese stage as a musical

Screw Shakespeare and forget that Chinese opera business - right now, preparations are underway to bring a sing-song version of Karl Marx's Das Kapital to the Shanghai theater.

This particular rendition of Marx's treatise against capitalism is borrowed from "a best-selling Japanese manga adaptation". We're not sure if anime and Marxism go hand-in-hand, but He Nian, Das Kapital's director has ambitious hopes for the play, according to Danwei:

He Nian says he will combine elements from animation, Broadway musicals, and Las Vegas stage shows to bring Marx's economic theories to life as a trendy, interesting, and educational play...

To director He Nian, Das Kapital and the theory of surplus value are serious issues, yet he wants to make them fun to watch. He will set the play in a business. In the first half of the story, the employees discover that their boss is exploiting them and learn of the "surplus theory of value." However, they react differently to the knowledge of their exploitation: some are willing to be exploited by the company, and the tighter they are squeezed, the more they feel they are worth. Others rise in mutiny, but this ruins the company and leaves them out of work. Still others band together and use their collective wisdom to deal with the boss...

He Nian said that due to the different points of view held by the boss and the workers, he would borrow the structure of Rashomon to show things repeatedly from different viewpoints.

Oh, Rashomon! So that's where some of the Japanese influences come into play. Oh wait, didn't they say manga earlier? As if the whole Marxist theory "edutainment" wasn't confusing enough...

Apparently though, there have been earlier theatrical adaptations of the Marx classic: a Japanese "writer, translator, and civil servant" adapted the book in 1931, which was subsequently translated into Chinese and published as A Dramatic Capital in 1949.