Smooth Diao’s day is going anything but.

Judging by how the stagehands treat him, you wouldn’t guess that he’s the foreman who makes sure there’s food on their tables – or that this bunch of yokels work for Xi’an’s premier theatre company, where their unseen grafting makes all the dazzling performances possible.

Whoever said showbusiness was glamorous? Keeping the gang out of trouble in the city's many dives and cheap noodle bars is a thankless job when all Smooth wants to do is get home in time every night to salvage his third marriage.

So, when this motley crew is given a seemingly ideal chance to set the stage for a performance in the nation's capital, it’s make or break. Can they set their internal drama aside and ignore the sneers of high society long enough to prove their worth? It’s time someone noticed who *really *makes the show go on.

Chen Yan is a Chinese dramatist and novelist, born in Shaanxi province in 1963. His novel The Protagonist, which depicts the life of a performer of Qinqiang, a genre of folk opera originating in Shaanxi, won the 10th Mao Dun Literature Prize in 2019. He has over 25 years of experience in theatre and became president of Shaanxi Opera Research Institute in 2004. Hu Zongfeng is the most prolific literary translator of his home province, Shaanxi. He serves as president of the Shaanxi Translators Association and director of the Edgar and Helen Snow Studies Center. He is academic dean of the School of Foreign Languages and director of the Shaanxi Research Institute of Culture and Translation at Xijing University. Robin Gilbank is originally from the North Yorkshire coast. He is now a professor of the School of Foreign Languages, Xijing University. With Hu Zongfeng, he launched the “Shaanxi Stories” series to promote the work of local authors in English translation. He is the author of An Englishman in the Land of Qin (2018) and Exploring China (2018), with the latter being longlisted for the Lu Xun Prize.