ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS FOR MAY 13, 2025
How the world covered the Tony nominations. Plus: a major move in licensing, Paris' Molière winners, and more
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.
The 2025 Tony nominations: They happened! There were snubs and surprises, which I wrote about in Variety! And this year’s Tony noms prompted a flurry of headlines from around the world, each with their own global spin on the news:
South Korean papers celebrated the success of Maybe Happy Ending, the Korea-born musical that racked up 10 nominations. “For a homegrown South Korean musical to accomplish this—without a known film intellectual property, a celebrity cast or English-language origins—is unprecedented,” writes Se-Min Huh in the Korean Economic Daily. “The rise of Maybe Happy Ending comes at a time when Korean cultural exports have never been more visible,” the story contends, citing the success of K-pop and the Oscar-winning film Parasite. “But while previous Korean musicals such as The Great Gatsby—a Korean production developed specifically for Broadway—have earned recognition, Maybe Happy Ending represents a purer cultural exchange. It premiered in Seoul. It was steeped in Korean aesthetics and linguistic nuances. And yet, it found resonance far beyond them, critics say.” (In addition to all the Tony love, the musical also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best musical.)
Down under, the six nominations scored by The Picture of Dorian Gray are enough to “drive a stake through the heart of the ‘cultural cringe,’” a term that refers to the tendency of Australians to undervalue their own arts and culture, especially in comparison to American and British work. That’s ABC Radio National’s take on the news, among other Aussie outlets hailing the noms as “a history making moment” (as declared in this ArtsHub story) and singling out the “extraordinary performance” by nominated Australian actor Sarah Snook (in the Herald Sun).
Filipino outlets trumpeted the “historic first” of the five Filipino-Americans nominated: actors Nicole Scherzinger (Sunset Boulevard), Darren Criss (Maybe Happy Ending), and Conrad Ricamora (Oh, Mary!), designer Clint Ramos (Maybe Happy Ending) and orchestrator Marco Paguia (Buena Vista Social Club). “It’s the first time in the history of the Tonys that as many as five Filipino-Americans bagged nods in a single year,” says Ruben V. Nopales in Rappler.
Real Women Have Curves songwriter Joy Huerta was already the first Mexican composer of a Broadway musical; now she’s the first Mexican artist to be nominated in the category of Best Score. In Mexican outlet Proceso, writer Niza Rivera says Real Women Have Curves “speaks to Trump,” noting that “its underlying theme, immigration, has become more sociopolitically charged over time.” As one of the show’s cast members, Aline Mayagoitia, says in an interview: “We’re worse off than when the play was written [in 1987].”
He may not have scored a nomination this year, but nonetheless Canadian playwright Bob Martin gets a spotlight feature about his work on two spring shows this season, Boop and Smash. The writer, who previously won a 2006 Tony for his book to The Drowsy Chaperone, “credits his homeland with giving him his offbeat and refreshing sense of humor,” writes Julianna Romanyk in CBC Arts. “Canadians are particularly good satirists,” Martin is quoted as saying. “We all grow up between two cultures: the British culture which influences us, and then the American culture which we make fun of.”
In a big move in the rapidly consolidating world of licensing, music company Concord acquired Broadway Licensing Global, growing the firm’s theatrical licensing business to incorporate BLG imprints Broadway Licensing, Dramatists Play Service, Playscripts, and Stage Rights. (Stageworks and the streaming service Broadway On Demand were not part of the acquisition.) Concord was already one of the biggest players on the scene, managing the rights to the musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Andrew Lloyd Webber as well as the Tams-Witmark and Samuel French catalogs. The acquisition, reported by outlets including Broadway News, makes Concord even more influential, and the move comes a little more than a year after BLG’s founder abruptly and mysteriously stepped down.
I wrote about the shakeup at BLG as part of my guide to the theatrical licensing business from last year:
Winners of the 2025 Molière Awards, the French equivalent of the Tonys, included the French-language production of Les Misérables. The Châtelet production of the storied title picked up the award for Best Musical; the night’s biggest winners were Jean-Philippe Daguerre’s new play Du Charbon Dans les Veines (Coal in Their Veins), about a local orchestra in a small mining town in the 1950s, and the Comédie-Française’s seven-hour production of Paul Claudel’s 1929 play Le Soulier de Satin (The Satin Slipper).
For more on France’s newfound love for Les Mis, check out this story from December:
In Seoul, real-life K-pop stars are turning out for a musical about K-pop, Again Dream High—and the celeb attention has prompted an extension of the show’s run. Based on Dream High, a popular 2011 Korean TV series about high school students with dreams of becoming K-pop idols, the musical Again Dream High was set to close June 1, writes Yeungeun Shin in Maeil Business Newspaper. Instead, the production will move from its current venue, Woori Financial Art Hall, and pick up performances again at the D-Cube Art Center from June 17-July 20.
Grease in an opera house? It’s happening in the UAE, where the show will play the Dubai Opera (Oct. 24-Nov 2) in a production presented by Dubai Opera, Mac Global, and People Entertainment Group.
Back to the Future zooms into Hamburg this spring, parking the DeLorean in the theater currently occupied by the German staging of & Juliet. There’s also a Tokyo production of Back to the Future up and running in Tokyo, in addition to the West End production, the North American tour, and upcoming stagings in Sydney and on Royal Caribbean cruise ships.
Madrid will get its own immersive production of Cabaret this fall in a new staging produced by local production company LetsGo. As Daniela Gutiérrez reports in El País, this Cabaret, staged at the UMusic Hotel’s Albéniz Theatre, has been designed so that “[t]he entire room will become a scenic space, completely eliminating the fourth wall,” says LetsGo’s Sergio Toyos. Drinks and food will be available in the venue beginning 45 minutes before curtain. With all of those choices, director Federico Bellone seems to be taking a cue from the success of the high-profile revival of Cabaret now playing in the West End and on Broadway, which has drawn crowds with a similarly immersive staging and robust F&B offerings.
A play about a psychoanalyst’s therapy session with a talking rabbit is a hit in Zurich, says Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. An absurdist depiction of contemporary anxiety written by British novelist Deborah Levy, 50 Minutes had a sold-out run earlier this year at Theater Neumarkt and will get another run this month. The show’s first run was such a hit that it “required extra seating in the auditorium to accommodate the enormous demand, with audiences sitting along the stairs when the seats ran out,” Akbar reports. “[Tine] Milz, who is German-born and part of a trio of female artistic directors at Theater Neumarkt, hopes to tour the play across Europe.”
FURTHER READING
Get the full story on Maybe Happy Ending in this deep-dive from the fall:
See how The Picture of Dorian Gray fits into the slate of original works in development at the Sydney-based Michael Cassel Group:
And learn more about the popularity of Broadway-style musicals in the Philippines in this feature from October:
