【5/10/2021 】CAPA-NoVA Distinguished Chinese Americans Project
(Author: Yuyan Zhou)
费翔 (Kris Phillips) （12/24/1960-) is born to an American father and a Chinese mother from Beijing. Fei Xiang spent his childhood in Taipei. Fluent in English and Mandarin Chinese, he graduated from Taipei American School and entered Stanford University in 1978. He returned to Taiwan in 1981 to pursue an acting career.
In 1987, Fei Xiang walked up to the stage of the Spring Festival Gala. In less than three minutes, Fei Xiang won the hearts of a billion. The two songs he performed on the Gala, Winter Fire and Clouds of My Homeland became smash hits in the 80’s. Following his subsequent albums, Fei Xiang became one of China’s all-time best-selling recording artists. Many of the songs from the beginning of his career were also re-released in the Mainland China during this period.
In 1990, Fei Xiang moved to New York to extend the range of his performances to Broadway. Under his English name Kris Phillips, he won a role in the original Broadway cast of the musical Miss Saigon (1991). Later that same year, he was seen in the original Broadway cast of another musical, Nick and Nora.
In 2001, Andrew Lloyd Webber produced and supervised a major production of The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber starring Elaine Paige and Fei Xiang. Andrew Lloyd Webber attended the Beijing performance of this concert, which was staged in The Great Hall of The People and filmed for DVD release and worldwide telecast. Through repeated broadcasts on China Central Television, this concert was instrumental in introducing musical theatre to a nationwide Chinese audience.
To further promote musical theatre among the Chinese-speaking audience, Fei Xiang released The Broadway Album in 2005, a double-CD recorded with a 36-piece orchestra in New York. One CD contains Broadway standards sung in English and a second CD presents other standards performed in Mandarin Chinese. The official Chinese-language version of several songs from The Phantom of the Opera were included on this album and Fei Xiang sang The Music of the Nightat at the Taipei premiere of the film version of The Phantom of the Opera 歌劇魅影 Fei Xiang made a surprise film appearance in 2012, starring as the chief villain, Tian Lang Sorcerer, in the Chinese fantasy epic Painted Skin: The Resurrection. He appeared on the red carpet at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and the film went on to smash China’s domestic film box-office record.
Fei Xiang is widely recognized as an icon of Chinese entertainment and enjoys enormous popularity among multiple generations of Chinese audiences.
For more information:
Fei Xiang at IMDb
http://english.cntv.cn/2015/04/18/VIDE1429352523478862.shtml?from=timeline&isappinstalled=0 (April 2015 Interview on China Central Television)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrggBcBBvks (great interview)
http://www.last.fm/music/Fei+Xiang/+wiki (more extensive biography)
http://www.feixiangbrazil.com/ (Brazilian fan website)
【Not only do we live among the stars, the stars live within us! 】
