ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS AND THE GREAT SCHEDULE EXPERIMENT OF 2024
Do you like shorter weekly emails better than longer, biweekly ones?
Happy 2024 and welcome to Jaques, your guide to the international theater industry. To kick off the year, let’s try something new.
For all you subscribers who have joined me for the first couple months of Jaques, you’ll have noticed that my biweekly emails have turned out to be… pretty darn long! It can be a lot to land in your inbox all at once, so I thought I’d break things up a bit and give a weekly schedule a try. Here’s the idea:
The newsletter would still consist of two main components, the news aggregate ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS and the deep-dive SPOTLIGHT STORY. Rather than send them both to you together on a biweekly schedule, I’m wondering if it might be more reader-friendly to switch to a weekly schedule and run each component on alternating weeks. That means you’d receive ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS one week, a SPOTLIGHT STORY the following week, ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS the week after that, then a SPOTLIGHT STORY, etc.
Every Tuesday all subscribers will receive a weekly email from me, with free subscribers getting the complete ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS as well as a preview email for each SPOTLIGHT STORY. Paid subscribers, as always, will have access to the full Jaques.
The SPOTLIGHT STORY will, admittedly, still be a pretty hefty email, as thorough and as richly detailed as you’ve come to expect. But with the BULLETPOINTS landing in your inbox separately, I’m hoping it won’t be quite as intimidating to scroll through. Plus, as I’m fiddling with email lengths, I’ll be experimenting with including more fun photos when the story warrants.
Let’s give it a shot and see how it goes—and along the way, I’d love to hear what you think. Next week’s newsletter will include a poll where all subscribers can share their opinions, but in the meantime, if you already love the idea—or hate it!—drop me a line.
And so: The Great Jaques Schedule Experiment of 2024, Week One. This week: ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS. Next week: the SPOTLIGHT STORY.
ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS
See? I told you panto was a big deal. Just days after Jaques highlighted the delightfully bonkers British tradition of holiday pantomimes, news hit that panto had been identified as one of the practices being considered for protected status under the 2003 Unesco Convention for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage. Now that the U.K. government has signalled its intention to ratify the convention, it’s encouraging the public to propose “festive traditions, such as Christmas pantomime” for formal recognition.
International arts workers from around the world will convene in New York City this month for APAP | NYC 2024, the 67th edition of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals’ annual conference running Jan. 12-16. Attendees from 18 countries outside the U.S. and Canada are scheduled to attend conference events that includes symposiums, award ceremonies and networking opportunities. There are also performances and showcases of artists and companies from around the world, presented under the umbrella of the APAP Live Performance Calendar or as part of the concurrent Under the Radar festival.
Antonio Banderas will direct the musical Tocando nuestra canción (They’re Playing Our Song) next year at Teatro del Soho, the Málaga theater he founded in 2019. Miquel Fernández and María Adamuz star as mismatched musical theater writers in the 1978 comedy by Neil Simon, Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager. The Spanish-language production launches in Málaga in June; previous Teatro del Soho musicals (Company, A Chorus Line) have gone on to tour other cities in Spain.
The South African playwright, producer and composer Mbongeni Ngema was killed in a car crash last month. Ngema, who was 68 at the time of his death, was best known as the creator of Sarafina!, the musical about student activists opposing Apartheid. The show had an 18-month run on Broadway in the late 1980s and inspired a 1992 film starring Whoopi Goldberg.
The U.K. and international tour of Mamma Mia! is wrapping up a run in Mumbai, where it’s one of a several Broadway titles playing this season at the new, splashy Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre. The ABBA musical’s stint there inspired composer-producer Mahesh Raghvan to record a new version of the title song played by a classical Indian violinist, a flautist, a sitarist and a tabla artist. The result got a shout-out in Rolling Stone India, and now I want nothing more than to see an entire production of Mamma Mia! reorchestrated by Raghvan.
The international tour of Hamilton starts performances in Abu Dhabi later this month, and there’s a curtain-raiser in Gulf Today about it. In breaking down the show’s characters and themes (ambition, sacrifice, nation-building), writer Muhammad Yusuf pays particular attention to the musical’s depiction of women’s rights: “[T]here is little doubt that feminism and women’s independence are also significant themes of the musical. … On the whole, Hamilton does not ignore the significance of feminism and women’s independence. Rather, it can be said to acknowledge and celebrate the strength and importance of women in history, despite the constraints of their time.”
Matthew Morrison announced—in Japanese, no less—that he’ll play a stint in a Japanese staging of Chicago this spring. The Glee star, who launched his career on Broadway in the original casts of Hairspray and The Light in the Piazza, will star in the show in Osaka and then Tokyo in April and May.
The musical Rocky is gearing up for a 2024 Brazilian production with a plan to play two months apiece in São Paolo and Rio de Janeiro, with a possibility of touring to other cities as well. As reported in São Bento Em Foco (via Google Translate), the show’s producers, led by Adriana Del Claro, have “received authorization from the Ministry of Culture to raise R$7.2 million (US$1.48 million) through the Rouanet Law.”
Year’s end brought out the cultural forecasts for 2024, with the Korea Times spotlighting upcoming Seoul productions of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Dear Evan Hansen, Aladdin and Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. The Australian’s roundup includes Groundhog Day and Beetlejuice in Melbourne and two productions of Candide, plus commercial stagings of Death of a Salesman (starring Anthony LaPaglia) and The Lehmann Trilogy at Sydney’s Theatre Royal. Manila, meanwhile, can look forward to Miss Saigon and Rent among other titles.
The New York Times delved into the complications of translation with a feature on Our Life in Art, the new Richard Nelson play initially written in English, translated to Russian for a planned Moscow premiere, and then translated again into French for the show’s rerouted debut in Paris. Nelson is himself a frequent translator of Chekhov’s work, so as Joshua Barone writes, “Nelson knows that the process [of translation] is more than mapping one language onto another; as with the plays by his hero and aesthetic ancestor, Anton Chekhov, it also requires the preservation of a specific, crucial sensibility.”
IN NEXT WEEK’S SPOTLIGHT STORY
Manga, musicals and how Frank Wildhorn flew under the U.S. radar to become one of the most popular theater composers in the world. Stay tuned.