ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS FOR AUGUST 6, 2024
The Edinburgh Fringe is in full swing, Philip Glass accuses a Crimean theater of piracy, a Korean musical about Frida Kahlo plays L.A., 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.
As of this week, I’m taking a late-summer hiatus from SPOTLIGHT STORIES (like this one from last week about the Edinburgh Festival Fringe), so paid subscriptions are temporarily paused. That means that billing cycles are currently frozen for both monthly and annual subscribers; they’ll resume (with ample warning) in the fall with the first of the SPOTLIGHT STORIES I’ve got on deck for Jaques Year 2.
In the meantime, these ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS will continue to land in your inbox every other week.
With the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe now underway, the deluge of press coverage begins—including in this very newsletter. Among the many recent stories about the high cost of putting on a Fringe show, this one from the BBC has my favorite headline—“I caught malaria in a medical trial to fund my Edinburgh Fringe show”—while the Stage has a handy explainer that breaks down the many constituents of the festival and how they operate. There are also a wealth of guides aimed at helping theatergoers sort through the 3,300 shows on the 2024 slate, from this one in the New York Times (spotlighting Hannah Gadsby, shows about disability and trauma, and spoofs of Gwyneth Paltrow) to this one in the Guardian (featuring, among others, Weather Girl, one of the shows produced by festival hitmaker Francesca Moody) to a series of posts by fellow Substacker
in his newsletter The Crush Bar.
Last week I talked to producers, artists and alumni of the Edinburgh Fringe to find out what keeps them coming back even as costs go up and up:
Composer Philip Glass has accused a Crimean theater of piracy as part of his public objection to the use of his work in a dance adaptation of Wuthering Heights at Sevastopol Opera and Ballet Theatre. Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 is not internationally recognized, and in an Agence France Presse story (via Barron’s), Glass is quoted as saying that although his music is used without his consent, he is “well aware that the current circumstances in occupied Crimea leave me powerless to assert my right under international law to prohibit this act of piracy.” Highlighting the fallout of the Russian occupation in the arts sector, the story adds that “Russian artists who have performed in illegally occupied areas have been sanctioned by Kyiv, lost prestigious roles abroad and been removed from online platforms.”
A Korean musical about Frida Kahlo will have its U.S. premiere at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles next month. Produced by EMK Musical Company, the major Korean production company behind the Seoul productions of Frankenstein and Your Lie in April that I recently wrote about, Frida: The Last Night Show “interprets the final days of Frida Kahlo’s life in a talk show format, reflecting on her challenges and triumphs through her art,” according to Mee-yoo Kwon in the Korea Times. The musical, performed by an all-female cast, plays USC’s Visions and Voices program on Sept. 6, accompanied by “a panel discussion exploring the ethics of cross-cultural representation in art between the USC faculty and the creative team behind Frida, including writer-director Choo Jung-hwa and producer Sophy Jiwon Kim.”
Frida Kahlo is a hot topic for stage shows all over the world: There’s also Frida Kahlo: Passion for Life, a dance-theater piece bowing in Barcelona later this year, plus a new musical in the works with the support of the Kahlo family, Frida: The Musical.
Speaking of Your Lie in April: The Frank Wildhorn musical recently announced it’s closing early in the West End; keep an eye out for how the news might impact brewing plans to take the English-language version of the show to the U.S. and beyond. For the moment, however, Your Lie in April is playing simultaneously in the West End and in Seoul, and What’sOnStage took the opportunity to pair a member of the London cast with an actor in the Seoul staging for a video conversation. In it, West End performer Rachel Clare Chan and Seoul actor Si-in Park, who each play the character of softball enthusiast Tsubaki in the teen romance, discuss the cultural differences revealed in their approaches to the production, how manga musicals play in the U.K. vs. South Korea, the show’s audience demographics in each country, and the difficulties of singing, dancing and acting while softballing. The West End staging, previously set to shutter Sept. 21, now closes Aug. 11; the Seoul production runs through Aug. 25.
I wrote about the Korean version of Your Lie in April in a story about my recent visit to Seoul:
There’s a production of Come From Away playing in Gander, Newfoundland, the remote Canadian town where the musical takes place, and fellow Substacker
has a review. In his newsletter Marquee, Benkof describes the staging by Newfoundland director Jillian Keiley as an “emotionally draining but ultimately satisfying presentation of an already moving show” about the generosity shown by the town toward an influx of global travellers stranded by air travel disruptions after 9/11. The local community participates in the show—at the performance Benkof saw, an understudy introduced a local whose church had taken in 40 Moldovans back in 2001—and Keiley, who also directed the musical in Gander last summer, says she and her collaborators aim to make the show an area tourist attraction, “hoping to produce the show locally every summer, encouraging people to make ‘pilgrimages’ to honor the musical and the town in which it was set.”In a mashup of a traditional theater and pop culture, a kabuki adaptation of the globally popular manga and anime Lupin III will stream globally on Aug. 11. As Nobuo Ishizaki reports in the Japan Times, the production reimagines the story and characters of Lupin III—seen in Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli movie The Castle of Cagliostro, among many other animated adaptations—in “an original story set in the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1568-1600) in which the Lupin gang battles bandits over a treasure.” In an interview, lead actor Kataoka Ainosuke describes the period costumes, the theme song re-orchestrated for traditional instruments, and the onstage waterfall, which streaming audiences can see for themselves next week.
Antonio Banderas said his Broadway project next year will be a play, not a musical, dropping this latest hint during the Starlight Gala, an annual charity fundraiser in Marbella, Spain. That’s all we know so far, but in the meantime Banderas is talking up his upcoming production of Gypsy in a Spanish premiere he’s directing at the Màlaga theater he founded, Teatro del Soho Caixabank. At the gala he also mentioned his ongoing charitable work; he’s quoted in this Antena 3 Noticias story as saying (via Google Translate), “Recently, we have also raised funds for the theater foundation that bears my name, which allows entry to the theater for excluded people who do not have the funds to attend the shows we organize.”
The Guardian’s chief theater critic Arifa Akbar explores the limits of theater as diplomacy in her review of a show that last month had a run at a 40-year-old culture festival on the Italian/Slovenian border. A four-hour adaptation a 1938 novel called The Emperor’s Tomb, the show—staged in Gorizia, a city literally bisected by the Italian-Slovenian border—is described by Akbar as “too muted,” leaving her “not quite sure how the production spoke to the politics of the moment, just as the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, stands accused of purging her enemies from the arts and cultural sectors.” She also delves into the history of the festival, noting, “A changed political climate may inevitably leave its imprint on government-funded cultural programming and define how politically inflammatory a theatre festival can be.”
The New York Times Magazine has a fun look at the creative team behind the puppetry for the stage adaptation of Spirited Away, which features “more than 65 puppeteered elements” including the characters No-Face and Haku the dragon.
Korean production company S&Co announced the cast of the Seoul premiere of Aladdin, which includes K-pop star-turned-theater-actor Jun-su Kim as Aladdin and Seong-hwa Jeong, the actor who dubbed the Korean voice of the genie for the 2019 live-action film remake of Aladdin, reprising the same role onstage.