Made just before the Cultural Revolution, it tells the story of two female Yue opera practitioners from the same troupe who end up taking very different paths in their lives: "one succumbs to bourgeois affluence and privilege, while the other finds inspiration and fulfilment in the social commitment associated with the May Fourth movement and the thought of Lu Xun.”[2] The film documents their journey through abusive feudal conditions in the countryside before achieving success and prestige on the stage, meanwhile historically following Shanghai's experience under Japanese and KMT rule.

The head of the troupe, A’Xin, intends to send the girl away, but Yue Opera teacher Xing, seeing her potential, takes Chunhua in as a disciple and trains her.

In 1941, Teacher Xing dies of an illness, and troupe master A’Xin sells his two best performers to Tang, a Shanghai opera theater manager, on a three-year contract.

Through this episode, Chunhua gets to know a "radical" lady journalist Jiang Bo (a female communist reporter investigating the death),[5] who advises her to become "progressive" to teach other Chinese to distinguish between truth and falsehood.

She starts performing “progressive” operas like an adaptation of Lu Xun’s ‘’The New Year Sacrifice’’ in an attempt to politicize the work of the troupe, whose production consequently gets banned.

On the boat the following day, Yuehong vows to learn her lesson and walk the "correct" path while Chunhua dedicates her entire life to performing revolutionary operas.

[8] Two Stage Sisters demonstrates director Xie’s keen interest in traditional Chinese opera art, which he had studied during the Japanese Occupation at the Jiangen Drama Academy.

"[7] Shanghai was often seen during the early days of the PRC as a symbol of the bourgeois decadence and as such, is seen as the ideal venue to depict the stage sisters’ struggles later in life.

Yuan Xuefen, a friend of director Xie Jin, and one of the world's most notorious Shaoxing Opera experts is argued to be the "real life prototype" of Zhu Chunhua's character in the film.

This was likely because "some of her undertakings inadvertently coincided with the interests of the left, such as her staging of Sister Xianglin and her refusal to be involved with the Yue Opera Workers’ Union, which was sanctioned by the Nationalist Social Affairs Bureau.”[10] However, she claims she did not act out of political motivation until after liberation.

The film's other two characters Xing Yuehong and Shang Shuihua are also said to be loosely based on Ma Zhanghua (Yuan's real life stage sister) and Xiao Dangui ("Queen of Yueju"), who in reality suffered at the hands of their theatre bosses.

Four years after the film's production, due to the obscure circumstances stemming from the Cultural Revolution, actress Shangguan Yunzhu tragically died by suicide as well.

This incident inadvertently ties Xie Jin's film deeper into exposing the hardships of the Cultural Revolution, as Shangguan's death was caused largely by the harsh persecution she faced for being deemed a counter-revolutionary.

"[17] Steve Jenkins on behalf of Monthly Film Bulletin commends Xie Jin's genre-defying work: "Stage Sisters remains a remarkable historical document to this day because it encapsulates a compelling effort to satisfy the contradictory requirements of state propaganda, classical Hollywood narrative continuity, and Soviet socialist realism.