ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS FOR APRIL 29, 2025
West End advice for Canadians skipping Broadway, a drop in productions in the U.K., Cameron Mackintosh's big plans, 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.
With a big Toronto season announcement, a local musical attracting buzz, and an increase in Trump-induced tensions, there are theater headlines galore coming out of Canada:
The prize for Canadian Headline Most Likely To Worry Broadway Readers goes to “Cancelling your trip to Broadway? Here’s what to see (and skip) on London’s West End instead.” As critic Aisling Murphy notes in The Globe and Mail, Canadians aren’t so keen on visiting the U.S. in the wake of the second Trump administration’s tariffs and saber-rattling: “32% fewer Canadians drove across the American border compared with the same period last year.” While it’s “too soon to tell if many of the approximately 3.8% of Broadway tickets sales attributed to Canadians will go unsold this year,” she, for one, is “sitting out this year’s southern travel plans.” Her West End advice: See My Neighbor Totoro and Dear England; skip The Devil Wears Prada.
Birthed at the Toronto Fringe and now playing the biggest Mirvish stage in the city, the buzzy, homegrown, Canadian musical Life After is shooting for Broadway, says writer Glenn Sumi in the Toronto Star. Composer, lyricist, and book writer Britta Johnson’s Life After is a “one-act musical about how a young woman named Alice deals with the unexpected death of her father.” After its 2016 Fringe premiere, the show has since played subsequent engagements in Toronto (2017), San Diego (2019), and Chicago (2022). “With each run, it has racked up acclaim,” Sumi notes. Of this latest production at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre, critic Martin Morrow writes in The Globe and Mail that in “the dazzling show now on display … every shiny surface seems stamped with ‘Next stop: Broadway.’ ” In the Toronto Star, critic Joshua Chong gives the show 3.5 out of 4 stars, calling the music “dense, layered and richly colored,” the lyrics “Sondheimian,” and the production “slick” and “successful” with “clear, if tacit, Broadway intentions.”
With the announcement of the next Off-Mirvish slate (a subscription season of Off Broadway-scale shows), Toronto’s 2025-26 season has come into focus with Tony winner Kimberly Akimbo, Broadway alum Bright Star, and London stalwart The Woman in Black claiming spots on the Off-Mirvish schedule. In the Toronto Star, Chong’s takeaways from the city’s full season lineup include: American works (like MJ, Octet, and Primary Trust) are still welcome; two “Canadian theater icons,” Erin Shields (with four new works on tap) and Robert Lepage (with three set to premiere in southern Ontario), have busy years ahead of them; and revivals, remounts, and inter-theater collaborations and co-productions will become more and more common.
The number of plays and musical staged in the U.K. by subsidized theaters has dropped precipitously in the last decade, the BBC reports. “In 2024, the 40 best-funded theatre companies that make their own productions—ranging from the National Theatre to the Colchester Mercury—opened 229 original productions, compared with 332 in 2014, a drop of 31%,” writes Ian Youngs. “Funding cuts and rising costs took much of the blame.” Execs at the National Theatre, Curve, Birmingham Rep, and more weigh in: “Many venues said they now co-produce more shows with other theatres or commercial operators to spread the costs and risks. That also means those productions can be on a bigger scale.”
Meanwhile, data from TRG Arts indicates that in the broader U.K. performing arts market, audiences and tickets sales are up “but finances remain ‘fragile’,” writes Katie Chambers in The Stage. Called “Raising the Curtain on Recovery,” the report tracked 177 U.K. arts organizations (including but not limited to theaters) between 2018 and 2024. Among the findings: venues are 6% fuller and ticket sales are 4% greater than in 2018-19, and—in a surprising twist on the BBC theater figures—“[t]here has been a 6% rise in the number of productions staged since 2018-19.” But “researchers also cautioned that its headline figures could mask ‘deeper financial fragility,’ drawing attention to a drop in ticket prices over the past seven years.” The report contends that recovery overall has been “uneven, with larger venues generally faring better than their smaller counterparts,” adding that “[a]n over-cautious approach to ticket pricing may be inhibiting reorders rather than aiding it.” Translation: dynamic pricing is good, actually, and “an ‘essential’ tool for the survival of subsidized and not-for-profit theatres,” as argued previously by the Society of London Theatres and UK Theatre.
Producer Cameron Mackintosh has big plans around the globe for his stable of shows, writes Mark Kennedy in the Associated Press. “Mackintosh,” Kennedy notes, “has a knack for returning to former triumphs, stripping them down and then building them up again, adding fresh new talent and delighting a new generation.” In addition to Old Friends, the starry Stephen Sondheim revue that premiered in the West End and is now on Broadway, there’s:
“a revitalized, multiyear North American tour starting in November of The Phantom of the Opera,”
“two tours of Les Misérables — one a worldwide arena concert tour and the other a traditional staging going through North America,” specifically to regional theaters with no Broadway stop planned,
a “new production of Miss Saigon [that] will launch a U.K. tour in the fall,”
a revival of Oliver! now playing in London and “which could end up on Broadway,” and
“the return to New York of his new Phantom” in a production that cuts the orchestra from 27 to 14 and will likely pick up the show’s tempo, as well.
Korean producer Chunsoo Shin’s musical The Great Gatsby, which has been running on Broadway since last year, just opened in the West End and will soon be joined by a Seoul staging in July. As on Broadway, West End reviews were mixed with a notable share of pans, including ones in The Times (“big, brash, noisy and one-dimensional”) and The Telegraph (“a screechy clodhopping musical that amps up the Roaring Twenties clichés at the expense of anything Fitzgerald had to say about class, money and the scissoring chasms between appearances and reality”). As noted in The Korea Times’ coverage of the opening: “Though The Great Gatsby has become a box office success, critical reception on both sides of the Atlantic has been notably harsh.” Reporter Meeyoo Kwon contends that although the musical does not incorporate any overtly Korean elements, “the show exudes a certain ‘K-vibe,’ particularly in the explosive solo numbers and high-energy ensemble choreography reminiscent of the aesthetics often seen in Korean musical theater.” The upcoming Seoul production will play in English this summer ahead of a Korean-language staging planned for 2027.
I talked to Shin for this popular story I published last spring, soon after The Great Gatsby opened on Broadway:
“The Picture Of Dorian Gray has become the most successful Australian show in six years on Broadway, yet hardly any of its investors are Australian — with a lack of local incentives for theatre investment being blamed,” says Michael Bailey in the Australian Financial Review. Describing the show as “the biggest antipodean splash on New York’s “Great White Way” since Moulin Rouge!,” Bailey notes that “just four of the 53 investors in the Broadway production of this Australian cultural juggernaut are Australian,” including lead commercial producer Michael Cassel. Unlike the West End and Broadway, the Australian theater industry has no tax incentives to encourage local investors—which is why Live Performance Australia is “calling for a tax deduction or rebate on live theatre production costs, provided those costs generated economic activity in Australia—similar to how the British and New York tax breaks work.” Among the points in LPA’s argument: the organization’s research has found that “a 40% rebate would support 168 new productions and create 4,151 jobs per year.”
In addition to Dorian Gray, Michael Cassel Group has a hefty development slate of original work that I wrote about last summer:
The music school associated with Japan’s famed, all-female Takarazuka Revue has experienced a continuing drop in applicants, write Sayaka Aoki and Aki Ikeuchi in The Japan News. Each year the school accepts 40 students; the applicant pool hit an all-time high of 1,930 in 1994 but was down to just 470 this year. The ongoing decline “is believed to be attributable to factors such as Japan’s declining birthrate, as well as to harsh working conditions within the Takarazuka Revue Company, which came to light in the wake of the death of a member in 2023.” Another contributing factor: the fact that “only a handful of star members of the troupe manage to become active on the front lines of the entertainment industry after leaving the company.”
Punchdrunk’s international, immersive theater sensation Sleep No More will return to Shanghai in a “special edition,” according to Zhang Kun in China Daily. The new version “will add more details and back stories of the characters, according to Ma Chencheng, executive producer of the show. It will also condense the three-loop narrative to two loops, shortening the performance time into two hours.” The story also drops some data tidbits on the show’s prior success in Shanghai: “Since its premiere on Dec 14, 2016, at the McKinnon Hotel in Jing’an district, the Shanghai edition of Sleep No More, produced by SMG Live, has presented more than 2,200 shows, attended by 620,000 people, and achieved total revenue of more than 560 million yuan ($76.74 million).”
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