ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS FOR NOV. 26, 2024
Fresh numbers on the Broadway-West End cost gap, new stats on China's booming musical market, Wicked in Madrid, 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 Broadway staging of Sunset Boulevard cost more than four times to produce in New York vs. what it cost in the West End, according to a feature in The Economist comparing production price tags on Broadway and the West End. As detailed in the story, the Broadway capitalization for Sunset rang in at $13.5 million vs. £2.5 million (~$3 million) for the West End iteration; the piece also notes that Hadestown, capitalized at $11.5 million for its Broadway opening in 2019, would have cost an estimated $18 million today. The reasons for all this line up with those I reported in my story from last year about this subject, but the Economist story digs up some new numbers, including an anecdote about the leads of London’s recent production of Next to Normal getting paid “something like £500 a week.”
My story about the Broadway-West End cost gap is the most popular edition of Jaques ever. Check it out here:
In China Daily, Nan Chen reports that during last week’s forum about musical theater at the Beijing Tianqiao Performing Arts Center, the China Association of Performing Arts revealed new statistics on the nation’s exploding musical market: “from January to October, there were 13,600 musical performances across the country, up 5.5% compared to the same period in 2023. Receipts reached around 1.4 billion yuan ($193.42 million), a year-over-year increase of 26.7%. Audience attendance increased to more than 5.8 million, up 4.6%.” The surge in interest is attributed to, among other things, an influx of international productions (including The Phantom of the Opera and Rebecca) and the spiking popularity of concert-format stagings of musical titles (e.g. the current tour of Rebecca now on the road in China). “By the end of 2024, the number of musical performances is expected to reach 17,000, with revenues surpassing 1.6 billion yuan [~$221 million] and the number of spectators exceeding 7 million,” Chen writes.
Meanwhile, domestic tourism for live performances is also on the rise in China, says a story from Xinhua. “People … who travel between cities to attend live shows are increasingly forming the core of China’s vibrant performance market,” according to the story, which cites a recent Tianjin concert by the band G.E.M. and a Nanjing production of the dance drama Dream of Red Mansions as popular with Chinese tourists. A production of The Phantom of the Opera has also proven a tourist magnet: “the cumulative box office for the show tour’s first three stops this year in China has already exceeded 135 million yuan.” That rise in domestic tourism is one of the contributing factors to the overall spike in sales for China’s live performances: “[a]ccording to estimates by the China Association of Performing Arts, revenue from commercial performances in the third quarter of 2024 in China is expected to hit 20.81 billion yuan [~$2.9 billion], marking a 41% increase year-on-year.”
With the movie adaptation now storming cinemas, SOM Produce will bring Wicked to Madrid in a non-replica staging in autumn 2025. As Juan-Jose Gonzalez notes in BroadwayWorld Spain, the Madrid production of Wicked will be “directed and adapted” by David Serrano, the busy director whose popular production of The Book of Mormon is now playing its second season in the Spanish capital. SOM Produce, “the largest theatre production company in Spain,” is also behind local iterations of Billy Elliot, Matilda, Grease, West Side Story, Chicago, and Mamma Mia!
Learn more about SOM Produce and the other local industry players in this story from May:
Louise Hughes is the new Chief Operating Officer at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group. Announced in outlets including Deadline, Hughes, who joins RUG from The Blair Partnership (J.K. Rowling’s entertainment agency), will spearhead the company’s legal, operational and business affairs across the globe, rounding out a new leadership team that also includes CEO James McKnight, Group CFO Lawrence Chapman and CCO Libby Grant. The addition of Hughes, plus a number of other shifts and hires in the company, comes as RUG is bumping up brand initiatives including the fan newsletter/website The Box Five Club as well as The Phantom of the Opera collabs such as Studio MinaLima limited edition prints and skateboards and apparel from Palace Skateboards.
The New York Times has a feature on the new, French-language version of Les Misérables that recently started performances at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris (which I just saw; more on that in an upcoming SPOTLIGHT STORY). Writer Laura Cappelle details the musical’s history in Paris, where it’s never been terribly popular, and the genesis of the new, non-replica production, which includes a significantly reworked French-language libretto. With musicals growing in esteem in France in recent years, this new Les Mis is showing promise: “The Châtelet run, through Jan. 2, is nearly sold out, and arrangements are being made to tour Les Misérables around the country, taking it outside Paris for the first time in the musical’s history,” Cappelle writes.
In Burkina Faso, the international theater festival Recreatrales brought together more than 150 African and European artists and 4,500+ audience attendees in a nation wracked by violent conflicts between extremist groups and the government. “For internally displaced people, theater is not just a tool for therapy, helping them to process trauma, said [Odile] Sankara, the [festival’s] artistic director,” writes Monika Pronczuk in the Associated Press. “It’s a way for a group that has been marginalized and isolated in Burkinabe society to be seen by others.”
The new K-drama Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born has prompted a recent Korea Times interview with a veteran performer of the declining, all-female Korean theater tradition called gukgeuk. In the story by Jin-hai Park, the 90-year-old Young-sook Cho recalls her days as a star of gukgeuk, which combines “elements of theater, music, singing and dance.” Park notes: “Despite its immense popularity in the 1950s and ’60s, gukgeuk rapidly declined as actors transitioned to film and broadcasting. While pansori [traditional Korean musical storytelling] was preserved after being designated an intangible cultural asset, all-female gukgeuk was left out of such protections, leading to the severing of its lineage.”
Also in South Korea, the Seoul Youth Culture Pass is entering its second year of subsidizing young people’s attendance at live events including theater and musicals. In a program that launched last year “with the goal of providing young people with a variety of cultural experience opportunities and revitalizing the cultural industry as a whole,” the pass “provides young adults aged 20 to 23 living in Seoul with a cultural voucher (card) worth 200,000 won [~$145] per year to support their visit to the performing arts,” writes Jin-Sik Song in The Kyunghyang Shinmun.
And other news, in brief:
A Brazilian bio-musical about Elvis Presley, O Rei do Rock—O Musical, has started a run in Rio de Janeiro,
Singin’ in the Rain is now playing Dubai for the first time, and
Back to the Future hits Sydney in September 2025.
AND ICYMI
Manila isn’t just an increasingly prominent stop for international tours—it’s also a hotbed of original musical development. Find out the local companies to know, the hit shows everyone’s talking about, the people who make them, the pride in their local language, and why it might be time for the rest of the world to check out the original titles coming out the territory. All that’s in last week’s SPOTLIGHT STORY:
Your story re Broadway vs. the West End was far better than this disappointing toe-dip from the vaunted Economist. Costs are "unexpectedly" lower in the UK? Unexpected by whom? This has been a consequence of the pandemic? So it's a new problem? No mention of the rise of streaming and the stubborn refusal of the Broadway establishment to improve the completely nasty experience, not to mention expemse, of attending a show. Very lazy writing and doubtless edited by someone who knows even less about the subject than the reporter....