ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS FOR JAN. 21, 2025
ATG acquires Madrid's SOM Produce, a Sailor Moon musical sets a U.S. tour, Broadway names win Korea Musical Awards, 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.
ATG Entertainment has acquired one of Madrid’s biggest stage producers, SOM Produce, a move that brings five Madrid venues under the umbrella of ATG, the international live entertainment firm that’s a major player on both sides of the Atlantic. SOM Produce—which has staged Spanish-language productions of shows including The Book of Mormon, Chicago, and Mamma Mia!—sells some 750,000 tickets annually, according to ATG’s announcement of the acquisition. “This is an exciting opportunity to further build ATG’s European operations,” ATG CEO Ted Stimpson says in announcement. “Madrid is becoming a global hub for theatre productions,” he adds, and explains the expansion will allow the company to “explore continued opportunities for ATG in a thriving new market.”
Get the scoop on Madrid’s musical boom in my story from May:
In a big move for the Japanese musical genre known as 2.5D Musicals, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon: The Super Live will play a North American tour this spring with stops in cities including New York, Chicago, and Seattle. I broke the news in Variety last week, describing the upcoming tour as “the longest sustained U.S. engagement of a Japanese stage show based on a popular manga or anime, following the head-turning success last fall of Attack On Titan: The Musical, which played a sold-out, three-day run at New York City Center in October.” As I mentioned in my SPOTLIGHT STORY about 2.5D musicals last year, musicals based on anime and manga have become big business in Japan, and now producers are hoping to find similar success with such shows abroad.
Learn more about 2.5D Musicals in this deep-dive from October:
Il Tenore, the musical written by the creators of Maybe Happy Ending, won the Grand Prize at the 9th Korea Musical Awards. As reported in the Korea Herald, the American composer of Maybe Happy Ending, Will Aronson, won the composition award for his work on Il Tenore, and Hong Kwang-ho won best actor for his performance in the show, based on the true story of Korea’s first opera tenor in the 1930s. The show was produced in Seoul by Chunsoo Shin, who’s also the lead producer of The Great Gatsby on Broadway; Shin is quoted in the Herald saying, “My new goal is to one day perform this piece on Broadway in our language.” Local stagings of Hadestown and Dear Evan Hansen were also among the shows to win trophies at this year’s Korea Musical Awards, held every January by the Korea Musical Association.
Meet Mr. Shin in this in-depth interview from June:
And get to know Aronson’s cross-cultural work with creative partner Hue Park in my story about Maybe Happy Ending:
Broadway veterans Lea Salonga and Arielle Jacobs (Here Lies Love) will star in Into the Woods in Manila this summer. The production continues the work begun by Broadway regular Clint Ramos and the late Bobby Garcia, the producer-director who passed away last month not long after the duo collaborated on a Manila production of the play Request sa Radyo headlined by Salonga and Dolly de Leon. Theatre Group Asia—an outgrowth of the partnership formed by Ramos, Garcia, and Manila’s Samsung Performing Arts Theater, with the aim of strengthening ties between Broadway and the Philippines’ theater industry—will produce Into the Woods in August 2025 with A Chorus Line to follow in spring 2026, according to the Daily Tribune.
Get the backstory on Request sa Radyo in my story from October:
China has begun to recognize live events and interactive experiences as significant drivers of tourism, according to a story in People’s Daily Online. One example: “Quanzhou city in southeast China’s Fujian Province hosted 50 large-scale concerts in 2023-2024, attracting over 800,000 visits and generating more than 10 billion yuan (about $1.36 billion) in consumption related to catering, accommodation, tourism and other sectors. In several concerts, audiences from outside the city accounted for more than 50 percent of the total.” Hoping for similar success stories, Chengdu, Xi’an, and Chaoyang district in Beijing are all among the Chinese territories making performances a local priority.
“London’s theatre scene is booming. Can pricey Broadway catch up?” asks Daniel Thomas in the Australian Financial Review. Comparing the West End’s strong post-lockdown recovery with the slower return of Broadway (with accompanying data and quotes from producers including Cameron Mackintosh and Francesca Moody), Thomas writes that producers have begun to question the value of a Broadway transfer: “The trend is a decisive shift in the balance between two cities that have long vied to be the world capital of theatre. … For many producers, London—and the British theatre sector more generally—is increasingly seen as a crucible for fresh, risk-taking work, while Broadway risks becoming a home for unadventurous revivals, Hollywood spin-offs or celebrity casting. The question is whether this realignment is temporary, or heralds a permanent change.”
I wrote my own story about the Broadway/West End cost differential—and how producers are navigating it—not long after this newsletter launched:
A group of #MeToo activists in the French theater industry have created a show about the movement and their experiences called Les Histrioniques. In her review of the Paris production in the New York Times, critic Laura Cappelle writes that “the group pulls no punches, while also lifting the veil in witty, revelatory fashion on other aspects of its activism—starting with the personal cost.” Cappelle adds that in Paris, “the [#MeToo] reckoning is far from over: One figure the production hints at, the actor Philippe Caubère, made headlines just last week after new accusations from underage victims appeared in Libération.”
GPS Brasília has a handy roundup of the biggest shows playing Brazil in 2025, including Mean Girls, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and Wicked…
… while Korean site The Musical has the 2025 stage slate for major South Korean production company CJ ENM, including Kinky Boots, Beetlejuice, Moulin Rouge!, and a return for homegrown musical Werther.
Australian actor Jason Arrow is wrapping up an 800-performance run playing the title character in Hamilton around the world, and the Sydney Morning Herald has the exit interview. Arrow speaks to the idea of making Alexander Hamilton palatable for audiences Down Under: “‘Something I noted at the start is, for Australians, Hamilton is a bad guy,’ he says. ‘If you want the audience to resonate with him, you’ve got to go down a different path.’ For Arrow, that meant finding where Hamilton could be viewed as ‘a bit more of a larrikin.’ … ‘I had to find the moments that I could be lighter, more comedic. There are not very many of them, but if you can’t do that early on, you lose the audience.’” Arrow finishes up his time with Hamilton when the current Sydney production closes Jan. 25.
Is it a good idea for real-life married couples to star in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? A couple of Canadian actors—including Paul Gross of Slings and Arrows—are about to find out, when Gross and his wife, Martha Burns, play George and Martha in a Canadian Stage production of Edward Albee’s play in Toronto. (Another real-life married couple was set to play Nick and Honey, but just yesterday one of them stepped back due to a medical condition.) Writer Glenn Sumi has a feature on the show in the Toronto Star, including how the couple prevents the play’s “boorish behaviour and crude, cutting insults” from seeping into their real lives.