This is an opera for children, an adaptation of the traditional Chinese opera, A Gathering of Heroes. A famous saying in the dramatic field goes, “Three thousand for Tang, eight hundred for Sung, an endless number for the Three Kingdoms.” It shows that there are endless stories of the Three Kingdoms to be told in Chinese Opera. With the passage of time, children today are not familiar with many traditional stories. But as stories of the Three Kingdoms are often adapted as computer games, feature films, and TV series, and have become part of popular culture, they are still well known by children. It is just that through adaptations by different media, these stories may have lost much of their original flavor. Seeing that children know but at the same time may not really know the stories of the Three Kingdoms, Guoguang decided to revise the Chinese opera, A Gathering of Heroes, making it into an opera for children.
        Producing an opera for children is quite different from producing a new opera. As children are not sufficiently seasoned to appreciate the singing, acting, and gestures of Chinese opera and their attention span tends to be short, the goal is to try to capture the attention of a youthful audience by instilling the esthetic values of traditional art forms into the performance. The playwright of The Double Scheme in the Three Kingdoms takes the popular theme of going back in time for this opera. The leading role is not a forceful historical figure, but a grade-school boy in modern times who, relying on his hindsight, has an adventure on the battlefield with Princess Xiang-Xiang. To shorten the distance between Chinese Opera and the lives and imagination of grade school children, the opera stays clear of classical speeches and long songs and focuses on agile movements on the stage. A fight scene between brothers and a battlefield scene of troops along a river allow actors to put on display their martial arts skills.
         It important for the audience to feel close to the characters in an opera performed for children, so the playwright and the director designed the scene “getting arrows with straw soldiers on ships” in the form of a game that invites audience participation. Each audience member is given an arrow upon entering the theater, and when the scene is performed on stage, the actors put on clothes made of straw and walk down the aisles. The audience is now transformed into Cao Cao’s troops, and under the command of Cao Cao, they throw the arrows they have at the straw soldiers. This game transforms the audience into performers, and their participation creates the climax of the opera.