ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS FOR JAN. 16, 2024
TikTok auditions, Under the Radar, and Beetlejuice in CDMX
The votes are in and the proposed weekly schedule won by a margin of 2:1, so: Welcome to Jaques, your formerly biweekly, currently weekly guide to the global theater industry. Let’s see how this new cadence works for everyone. (Including me.) As always, if you have thoughts or ideas or just want to say hi, drop me a line.
In this week’s edition: the ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS, my international survey of global theater news. It’s free for all readers.
ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS
Auditions on TikTok? That’s a thing now. Actor-singer-producer Tiago Abravanel, who has the rights to produce and star in Hairspray in Brazil in 2024 (dates and cities to be announced), is holding auditions for the show exclusively via the production’s TikTok channel. “According to the actor’s vision, using TikTok for auditions is a way to democratize the process and reflect the musical’s inclusive values,” writes Claudio Martins in a story on A Broadway É Aqui (and translated here by Google Translate).
Spanish musical El Tiempo Entre Costuras (The Time in Between) will wrap up its current tour of Spain with a return to Madrid (April 7-May 12). Based on a popular novel by Maria Dueñas, the show, about a dressmaker’s globe-spanning adventures in couture and wartime espionage, has been on tour since September, when it resumed a run that had been previously interrupted by the pandemic. With music by Iván Macías and libretto by Félix Amador, the musical is one of several homegrown projects from producer Dario Regattieri and his typographically idiosyncratic company beon. Entertainment, which is “committed to the production of its own and original titles created by 100% Spanish talent,” according to the beon. Entertainment website.
Broadway Licensing Global made a couple of hires to lead its recently opened London office, tapping Music Theatre International veteran James Cawood as Director of Licensing U.K. and Europe and Shay Virk as Manager of Marketing. The duo will “lead the charge so that every UK and European theatre has full access to our extensive catalogue of more than 8,000 plays and musicals,” said company founder and CEO Sean Cercone. One of the biggest players in international theatrical licensing, BLG is the parent company of Dramatists Play Service, Playscripts, and Stage Rights, and also manages the amateur rights to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in a version specially adapted for high schools and secondary schools.
The international experimental performance festival Under the Radar is now underway in New York City, and the New York Times article about this year’s edition, newly restructured since it lost its longtime home at the Public Theater, has a look at the hurdles that travelling productions face when they cross borders. “To bring an international show to New York is a process that must begin many months (or ideally, years) in advance,” writes Alexis Soloski, describing the limitations on production scale, the difficulties of securing visas, and the specifics of funding (“typically a collaboration between the sponsor theater and the international artists, who can apply in their home countries for government and private grants, which can be used to cover airfare and hotel costs”).
The U.S. tour of Beetlejuice is heading to Mexico City this summer. The run (July 30-Aug. 18) is part of local producer Alejandro Gou’s efforts to bring U.S. and international tours to CDMX as a way to program large-scale shows that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive in the city. He’s also announced intentions to bring in Back to the Future, Pretty Woman and Moulin Rouge!
The Stage has a feature on English-language theaters abroad in which editor Natasha Tripney highlights the “significant role” that such companies fulfill, arguing that they “not only offer employment and development opportunities for British actors and creatives, but they occupy a unique position in the local theatre scenes in which they are based.” The industry seems to agree: When a 2022 dispute over a lease threatened the future of the English Theatre Frankfurt, theater pros from around the U.K. signed on to a campaign proclaiming that the theater’s closing “would be as big a loss for British theatre as the closure of any thriving regional theatre in the UK.” (The dispute was eventually resolved, and the English Theatre Frankfurt lives on.)
Smaller-scale, arthouse-style musicals have long found a foothold on Broadway (with award wins, anyway, if not always box office success), as Avenue Q paved the way for future Tony champs like Spring Awakening, Fun Home, A Strange Loop, and Kimberly Akimbo. Now, a story in the Guardian points out, the small-and-quirky trend has picked up on the other side of the pond. “A fresh kind of musical theatre show, set apart by having started life on the fringe or in a small-scale provincial production, is challenging the established order in London’s West End this season,” writes Vanessa Thorpe. “A wave of new, quirky productions will be taking their places alongside Phantom of the Opera-style classics and all those big, popular musicals that rework a familiar film title or milk a superstar legacy.” Among the titles in the spotlight are the two-actor musical Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), getting a West End run at the Criterion Theatre starting in April, as well as the incoming Starter for Ten, Kathy and Stella Solve a Murder! and the current small-scale success Operation: Mincemeat.
Toronto Star critics rounded up the 2024 shows they’re most looking forward to, in a story that includes local stagings of The Inheritance, Dana H., Something Rotten! and One Man, Two Guvnors. Also on the docket are new productions including a Bacchae reimagining called Dion: A Rock Opera, an adaptation of Three Sisters by Inua Ellams, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead starring two former hobbits, Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd.
IN NEXT WEEK’S SPOTLIGHT STORY
A Sondheim comedy, a Madonna jukebox, and a new Champs Élysées venue with Broadway ambitions: How Paris learned to love the Broadway musical. (Finally.)