Best bets

2016 AFC Champions League

Date: Feb 9 - 7:30 pm

Venue: Shanghai Stadium

Price: 50-380 yuan

The 2016 AFC Champions League will be the 35th edition of Asia's premier club football tournament organized by the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), and the 14th under the current AFC Champions League title. Guangzhou Evergrande are the defending champions. The winners will qualify for the 2016 FIFA Club World Cup. As Japan is the host nation for the 2016 FIFA Club World Cup, if a team from Japan wins the AFC Champions League, the runners-up will also qualify.

BBC Documentary Concert - Frozen Planet

Date: Feb 27-28 - 2:30 pm/7:30 pm

Venue: Shanghai Children Art Theater

Price: 80-480 yuan

An evocative live orchestral music with breathtaking HD images of "the majestic and frozen wilderness of the Polar Regions" from the landmark BBC television series, which is a unique audio-visual feast. Frozen Planet accompanied by the George Fenton's well-received score and performed by Shanghai Opera House Orchestra.

Bilingual Children's Musical - Five Fools

Date: Jan 30-31 - 7:30 pm

Venue: Shanghai Drama Art Center-D6 space

Price: 160-360 yuan

Five Fools tells the story of a circus with some rather unusual problems. The clown is mad, the musician is bad, the strongman is love-struck, and the new star, Little Flower, won't speak at all. Somehow, within all this madness, a touching story evolves in which love and support conquer fear, and a bright future unfolds for the characters. This show combines interactive sets, live music, acrobatics, illusion and ample amounts of comedy to create a fast paced and hilarious visit to the world of this crazy circus. The bilingual production makes the show suitable for both Chinese speaking and English speaking kids, creating a didactic as well as fun experience that may encourage language learning.

Henry IV Part II by Royal Shakespeare Company

Date: Feb 26 - 7:15 pm

Venue: Shanghai Grand Theater

Price: 162-880 yuan

To mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death in 2016, Great Britain's famous Royal Shakespeare Company is coming on its first major tour to Shanghai with highly acclaimed new productions of Henry IV Part I, Part II and Henry V - which paint an epic, comic and thrilling vision of a country. Shakespeare's Henry trilogy charts Prince Hal's journey from his rebellious youth to famed warrior king Henry V, as a rich panorama of medieval English society unfolds between dingy alehouse and cloistered court.

Peking Opera - The Unicorn Purse

Date: Feb 11 - 7:30 pm

Venue: National Center for the Performing Arts

Price: 100-580 yuan

The Unicorn Purse is a classical repertoire with concentrated expression of Cheng School. By means of describing an unconstrained girl Xue Xiangling's vicissitudes from affluence to poverty, playwright Weng Ouhong poetically expresses unlimited inconstancy of human relationships and fickleness of human nature to everyone's knowledge. Cheng Yanqiu designs elegant and unusual singing aria and beautiful posture for this play. Aesthetic stylized performance contains profound worldly emotions and philosophy of conducting in the society. In May 1940, The Unicorn Purse made its debut at Shanghai Golden Grand Theater. It was staged for consecutive ten sessions, and the audiences swarmed into the theatre. Since then, the story on Xue Xiangling firmly touches the hearts of countless audiences.

National Ballet Britain The Great Gatsby

Date: Feb 3-5 - 7:30 pm

Venue: National Center for the Performing Arts

Price: 220-1,200 yuan

A new full-length story ballet based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, choreographed by David Nixon, is the perfect project for this energetic, enthusiastic ensemble - the characters are strong, the locations distinctive, the atmosphere unforgettable. But Gatsby adaptations are tricky to pull off - witness the ambivalence attending the release of Baz Luhrmann's new movie version - at least in part because the novel, despite its obviously filmic qualities, actually derives much of its effect from an intense evocation of the intangible and invisible: moods, feelings, suspicions. Moreover, the characters are hard-to-nail cocktails of mannerisms, some of which - like Daisy's murmur - cannot be translated into dance.