ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS FOR APRIL 1, 2025
The view of Broadway from abroad, Wicked in Brazil asks audiences to behave, a busy musical season in Shanghai, 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.
It was probably inevitable: New York’s spate of local headlines about sky-high ticket prices have affected the Broadway view from abroad. Case in point: this article in the Spanish-language business and economic newspaper Expansión. “Broadway: Theater Tickets at €1,000 to See Celebrities,” reads the headline, which focuses on the tippy-top-dollar price tags at Glengarry Glen Ross starring recent Oscar winner Kieran Culkin. “Although some websites advertise tickets for less than €100, the truth is that there are no tickets for sale that cost less than €120, and only if it’s on a Wednesday lunchtime and in a low-visibility area,” says the story (via Google Translate). “On one side of the stalls, the official price starts at €350, but everything is sold out for the weekends, and tickets can only be purchased on resale for around €1,000 (including a €250 booking fee per ticket).” In addition to noting similarly high prices at Othello starring Denzel Washington, the story offers this (somewhat oversimplified and exaggerated) explanation: “Since the pandemic, Broadway has opted to sign famous actors to revive the live entertainment industry, which was on the verge of losing its bright lights when the lockdowns ended, drowned by debt and a complete lack of audiences.”
Speaking of global viewpoints: Last week I had a great discussion with Situation Group founder Damian Bazadona and Situation UK chief Pippa Bexon about the West End and its place in the global market. BroadwayNews covered our discussion in this story by Michael Abourizk, and you can find a link to the whole conversation on Situation’s website.
The Brazilian production of Wicked has audiences singing and dancing in the aisles—so much so that producers are asking fans to behave. “In recent days, videos of fans singing and dancing effusively during the musical, inspired by the Oscar-nominated film, have gone viral on social media,” reports Rafael Monteiro for CNN Brasil (via Google Translate). “From now on, an audible announcement at the beginning of the show will ask the audience to try to remain silent during the show, leaving the applause for the end of the musical numbers,” adding an additional request to refrain from taking photos or filming. It’s a return run in São Paulo for this non-replica production of Wicked, which attracted some social-media buzz with its impressive flying effects during an earlier engagement in 2023.
As noted in a separate CNN Brasil story, “With 80,000 tickets already sold, the show promises to be one of the biggest theatrical successes of the year in the capital of São Paulo.” BroadwayWorld has a first look with videos from the production, which runs through April 13.
And in other Wicked news, the recent Australian production has booked an engagement (March 19-April 27) at the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, bringing the musical back to the city for the first time in 20 years.
The French musical Molière, l’Opéra Urbain, the Japanese stage version of Spirited Away, and Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake are among the titles on the 2025 schedule at Shanghai Culture Square, a 14-year-old venue described by Zhang Kun in China Daily as “[t]he first theater in the city designed for the showcase of musicals.” Kun writes, “A large number of musical fans have developed in the city, with groups interested in Broadway shows, and those who follow French shows, and German shows respectively, [Culture Square general manager Yuanhong] Fei found. ‘Our audiences are showing robust consumption for overseas theater productions, so it is natural that many shows choose to present their Chinese premiere in Shanghai,’ ” Fei is quoted as saying.
In a separate story in China Daily, Kun reports on the 30 productions that will play Shanghai AIA Grand Theatre in 2025, including Sunset Boulevard with Sarah Brightman, a Russian production of the Broadway musical First Date, and The Lord of the Rings musical. It’s a schedule organized into “chapters,” with international productions making up the first. “The second chapter features Chinese theater productions… The third chapter consists of a series of concerts by artists from home and abroad, and the fourth chapter features traditional Chinese folk operas.”
I love a story about translation, and here’s one in The Kyunghyang Shinmun that’s a profile of “transcendent translator” Seok-hee Hwang, who gained notice for his apparently sidesplitting Korean translation of the first Deadpool movie and has branched out into translations of musical theater. He’s now drawing attention with his new translation of Once, which is said to be notably funnier than the first Korean translation seen in Seoul in 2014. “Hwang is also looking forward to translating the premieres of the musicals Lempicka and Frozen,” writes Ji-hyun Jeon. Hwang is quoted in the story saying, “There is definitely an unbridgeable gap between the two languages. If you don’t capture all the nuances, you may only be able to translate 80% of what you’re willing to do. But in a performance, the actors sing and act, the director directs, and the choreographer moves, and they fill in the blanks.”
Last year I heard from musical theater translators around the world about how they do what they do—and why it’s so hard:
The internationally popular West End and Broadway comedy The Play That Goes Wrong is makings it Indian premiere in Delhi in an adaptation called Harshvardhan Haveli Mein Hatya. The Delhi production is the handiwork of Ananya Shrangi, a software engineer moonlighting as a theater director, according to Dipanita Nath in The Indian Express. In his adaptation, Shrangi has “moved the action to Himachal Pradesh in 1972, retaining a post-colonial atmosphere. … The language is ‘60% Hindi and 40% English.’ There are nods to reels and viral stories on social media platforms, [the 1983] film comedy Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron and [the work of singer] Talat Aziz.”
With theaters around the world starting to make changes to reduce their environmental impact, the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam is leading by example with its Green Deal program, writes Joshua Barone in The New York Times. According to the reporter, the “opera house has brought sustainability to virtually every corner of its operation. This year, it even updated its contracts for creative teams to include a commitment that their productions use at least 50 percent recycled material.” But he’s aware not every organization in every country will have it as (relatively) easy as the DNO: “The Dutch National Opera, to be clear, has the advantage of its Green Deal efforts being backed by generous state funding, as well as the luxury of operating in the Netherlands, a country where sustainability is woven into daily life,” Barone writes. “It would be a much more difficult undertaking in the United States, where climate change is comparatively politicized and financially starved opera companies barely have the structural wiggle room to get rid of their plastic Champagne flutes.”
I took a look at worldwide efforts to green the theater industry in this story from a year ago:
In the latest Trump 2.0-era missive from Canada, a CBC Lite story asks, “Can Come From Away help us bridge the growing schism between Canadians and Americans?” According to reporter Amelia Eqbal, “With tensions between Canada and the U.S. making headlines daily, Come From Away feels more relevant than ever.” She interviews two creatives involved in the annual Gander production of the musical—director Jillian Keiley and American actor Darrell Morris, Jr.—to get their take.
LAST WEEK IN JAQUES
I talked to Barrie Kofsky, the Australian-born, Berlin-based director getting a major New York showcase this weekend with The Threepenny Opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music:
THE AUSTRALIAN DIRECTOR CANONIZING AMERICAN MUSICALS ON GERMAN STAGES
Barrie Kosky brought Broadway to Berlin in a big way—and he's got even more musicals on the way.
AND A NOTE ON SCHEDULING
As this newsletter lands in your inbox, I’m spending the week sailing the high seas as part of my annual gig with The Broadway Cruise. My time away means next week’s newsletter will be making its way to you a little later than usual. See you when I’m back on dry land!
Terrific column.