SHEN YUN PERFORMING ARTS REVIEWS

Musician Impressed With Song and Message in Shen Yun

Apr 13, 2025

4/13/2025Updated: 4/13/2025

UNIVERSITY PARK, Ill.—The audience enjoyed the all-new season of Shen Yun Performing Arts at the Center for Performing Arts at Governors State University on April 13.

Michael DeGregorio gifted his wife with tickets to Shen Yun as a belated Christmas present, which he called “phenomenal.”

“We love this stuff,” he said.

Shen Yun has a live orchestra with Western and Eastern instruments creating harmony together. Mr. DeGregorio, formerly a professional musician and now owner of a roofing company, added that he could hear Chinese melodies and rhythms in the dances.

“When you hear Chinese infused into the Western music, you can hear it through the dance. You know what’s happening,” he said. “It’s hard to describe or interpret, but I understand the beats. I understand the rhythms. I get that.”

Part of Shen Yun’s performance are solo singers who sing in Mandarin using the traditional bel canto technique. The lyrics are projected in English on the stage backdrop.

Mr. DiGregorio said of the singer, “He’s phenomenal. Phenomenal. I love the story. He was great. [I liked] the story that he told. You can see the words up behind what he was talking about. He was talking about that we are all from the divine—we are divine originally.”

The spiritual message that he got from the lyrics resonated with Mr. DiGregorio.

“Everything about the story resonated with me because my wife is very Christian. My son is unbelievably Christian. I’m not so much so. I was brought up very Catholic, but I’m starting to find it again. And that story resonates with me. Yes, everything he spoke about up there,” he said.

Shen Yun tours the world to revive China’s traditional culture before communism. Today, the communist regime continues to persecute religious believers like Falun Gong, which teaches meditation and the moral tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. Shen Yun, whose performers practice Falun Gong, is banned in China.

Mr. DeGregorio was surprised at the suppression of spiritual belief in communist China. “Especially the fact that I didn’t do a lot of research on Falun Gong, and the religious kind of aspect, and the whole thing about China, and how [Shen Yun] is not even allowed to perform there.”

He was moved by their message. “Religious persecution type stuff drives me nuts,” he said.

The 3D interactive backdrop amazed Mr. DeGregorio in how it worked with the performers. “What’s going on is phenomenal. It’s really cool. We got a middle row so we can see everything—perfect. When people jump off the stage and then they fly away on the screen, that’s really cool,” he said.

From personal experience as a drummer in a band, Mr. DeGregorio knows what it’s like to produce a show. He was really impressed by the skill and dedication of the performers and production team.

He was amazed at “all the hard work and effort [required] into coordinating just the dance and the orchestra. I was in a band, so I know about being in bands. [All the coordination needed] with that has got to be really hard. It takes a lot of work, so I understand the work.”

Reporting by Sherry Dong and Yvonne Marcotte.

The Epoch Times is a proud sponsor of Shen Yun Performing Arts. We have covered audience reactions since Shen Yun’s inception in 2006.