ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS FOR NOV. 12, 2024

The Toronto market's upbeat outlook, the U.K. arts budget snub, Madrid's new discount program for young theatergoers, and more

& Juliet begins an open-ended run in Toronto in December 2025. Photo: Matthew Murphy

Welcome to the latest edition of ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS, my regular roundup of theater headlines from around the world. New to Jaques? Check out this handy explainer.

• Mirvish Productions’ upcoming, open-ended Toronto run of & Juliet is the latest indicator that the city’s theater business is roaring back to life, according to reporter David Friend of The Canadian Press. Following the earlier announcement of the long-term return of The Lion King to Toronto, & Juliet is “the second open-ended run announced by Mirvish in recent months, which suggests the company feels optimistic about the turnaround of live theatre. COVID-19 closures and audience reluctance to return to some of their old entertainment habits left shows like Harry Potter and the Cursed Child closing sooner than expected.” Open-ended runs with local casts “rely on broad appeal, return patrons and good reviews to keep afloat and, according to Mirvish spokesperson John Karastamatis, they cost about $1 million per week to mount.” Karastamatis is quoted in the story saying, “Last year, we [Mirvish] sold 2 million tickets, which is unheard of, so for us, the audience has come back in a very strong way.” & Juliet starts performances in Toronto in December 2025.

• The U.K. government’s autumn budget snubbed industry pleas for funds that could prevent theater closures across the country in what Alistair Smith in The Stage calls a “crushing disappointment for the theater sector.” Two local industry bodies, the Society of London Theatre and UK Theatre, had petitioned Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour-led government for an “urgent funding pot of £30 million to carry out crucial repairs and stave off closure over the next year, with an estimated £300 million needed as part of a wider 10-year plan for the sector.” As the Stage’s Katie Chambers reports, a submission to the Treasury from SOLT and UK Theatre “warned that without significant capital investment over the next five years, nearly 40% of venues will be in danger of closing and 40% will become too unsafe to use.” Smith writes of the recently announced budget: “[A]fter the optimism in the arts world that greeted Labour’s return to power … the party’s first Budget in 14 years is a crushing anti-climax.”

• One of the most active producers of musicals in Madrid, SOM Produce, has launched a lower-price ticket program for young theatergoers 25 and under. The tarifa joven offers 25€ tickets to SOM shows The Book of Mormon, Grease, and Mamma Mia! Aimed at broadening the city’s theatergoing demographic, SOM’s latest ticketing initiative occurs as Madrid’s appetite for musicals expands and the city has become a theater destination for Spanish-speaking tourists. As Juan-Jose Gonzalez notes in his story in BroadwayWorld Spain, SOM had previously introduced Kids Week, a discount program for young theatergoers (inspired by similar programs in New York and London) which “was received by the market with great enthusiasm, achieving record figures: an average attendance of teenagers exceeding 60% of the spectators in all performances between June 20 and July 14, 2019.”

I’ll be heading to Madrid later this week for an upcoming SPOTLIGHT STORY. Before that, get the scoop on the overall market with this newsletter from May:

BROADWAY FOR SPANISH SPEAKERS

• I recently discovered that an indigenous reimagining of Grease called Bear Grease is touring North America in a production created by L.A.-based artists Crystle Lightning and MC RedCloud (Henry Andrade). “Set in a parallel universe where colonization never happened, Bear Grease retains the 1950s setting of the original show, but reimagines its aesthetics and cultural references. Instead of poodle skirts, the women wear outfits adorned with beadwork and ribbons; and the T-Birds are now the Thunderbirds, with Indigenous iconography proudly stamped on their jackets,” writes Vicki Duong in The Georgia Straight’s story timed to the show’s run in North Vancouver. The music, meanwhile, “stays true to the era’s early rock ‘n’ roll sound while incorporating traditional drumming, flute, and hip-hop,” and the creatives tailor individual performances to incorporate words from regional languages and local references.

• Produced by a Korean, created in New York—and now heading to London: The Great Gatsby, the Broadway musical produced by Chunsoo Shin of Seoul’s OD Company, will get a West End production this spring, with the show starting performances on April 11, 2025 at the London Coliseum. International markets have always been part of the plan for the title—Shin told me earlier this year that he was eyeing Japan, China and Australia, in addition to the U.K. and South Korea—and, with the show chugging along to solid sales on Broadway, this new London production looks like the first of many iterations bound to proliferate around the world.

Read the full interview with Chunsoo Shin, the Great Gatsby producer and chief exec of Seoul’s OD Company, in this story from June:

MR. SHIN GOES TO BROADWAY

• Indian composer A.R. Rahman and American producer Ken Davenport are developing a musical adaptation of Slumdog Millionaire, the 2008 movie that won eight Oscars including two for the composer. The show, with a production timeline and full creative team still to be announced, will include songs from the movie as well as new tunes. Rahman, who has recently talked up the idea of creating a Broadway-like hub in Chennai, previously wrote the score for the West End and Broadway musical Bombay Dreams.

• The success of Kinky Boots in Seoul over the last decade “has contributed to a growing sense of openness in Korean society,” according to Mee-yoo Kwon in The Korea Times. In the story, the resident director of Seoul’s current staging of the musical, Sul-in Shim, is quoted saying, “Seeing audiences cheer for a drag queen with such enthusiasm is incredible. I think Korea has become more diverse and open in many ways over the past 10 years.” In the interview, Shim also credits the musical’s themes of family and connection for its ongoing popularity in South Korea, and also details the challenges and rewards of the Korean casting model, which typically sees two or more well-known actors alternate in major roles.

• Next year The Phantom of the Opera will play India for the first time when the global megahit begins a run at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre in Mumbai on March 5, 2025. It’s the latest musical to be presented in the luxe new venue, which is shaping up to be a regular stop for international tours that in the last 18 months have included Matilda, The Sound of Music and Mamma Mia!

• A new adaptation of Madame Butterfly in Kyoto will be the first work conceived by a foreign artist at a major kabuki theater, reports Ansel Swindells in The Japan Times. Conceived by the American Gary Perlman, who’s lived in Tokyo since 1980, the kabuki version was inspired by a bunraku puppet staging of the opera and aims to bring the story closer to historical reality, telling the story through “the use of a traditional michiyuki scene in which a dancer and a tayu (kabuki narrator) express Butterfly’s complex feelings,” Perlman says.

• While Elf stops in Abu Dhabi and Monaco this holiday season, another Yuletide title, Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas: The Musical, will play Dubai in a quick holiday run.

MEANWHILE ON BROADWAY

Maybe Happy Ending, the musical celebrating its opening at Broadway’s Belasco Theatre on Nov. 12, may be new to New York audiences but the show has already been an award-winning hit for years in Seoul, where the show premiered in Korean in 2016. In last week’s SPOTLIGHT STORY, I talked to the musical’s bilingual creative team and American producer about shepherding the show to Broadway across two continents and two languages.