ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS FOR MAY 14, 2024
Maybe Happy Ending on Broadway, a Tim Hortons donut musical, the first Saudi opera, rethinking Filipino audiences' love for Miss Saigon, and more
Welcome to the latest edition of ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS, my regular roundup of theater headlines from around the world. New to Jaques? Get the scoop here.
Hot off the wire: The Korean-born musical Maybe Happy Ending has lined up a Broadway run starting in October. Darren Criss (Glee) and Helen J Shen (Teeth) headline a production directed by Tony-winner Michael Arden (Parade), who previously staged the show at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre in early 2020. A speculative near-future tale about anthropomorphic “Helper-Bots” finding romance, the musical by American composer Will Aronson and South Korean writer Hue Park originated in a Korean-language premiere in Seoul in 2016 (and will return to the city for a fifth season later this summer). Jeffrey Richards and Hunter Arnold, currently nominated for a Tony for Purlie Victorious, produce the Broadway incarnation alongside Criss making his Broadway producing debut. It’ll be the second new musical with South Korean roots to arrive in New York this year, following the April opening of The Great Gatsby backed by OD Company’s Chunsoo Shin.
Is this the start of a Korean wave on Broadway? I took a look at Seoul’s push to export its original musicals back in November:
In a delightfully bonkers marketing venture, Canadian coffee and donut chain Tim Hortons is producing an original, one-act musical premiering in Toronto in June. Two alums of Beautiful on Broadway, Chilina Kennedy and Jake Epstein, star in The Last Timbit, a show “loosely inspired by the true story of a 2010 snowstorm during which about 80 people sought shelter at a Tim Hortons in Sarnia, Ont., for nearly 24 hours,” reports Joshua Chong in the Toronto Star. Come From Away producer Michael Rubinoff is attached. As Chong notes: “If ticket sales are strong, the short run could be extended, said Rubinoff, adding he hopes it can be shared with more Canadians across the country.”
In other Canadian theater headlines, Off Broadway success Titanique will play Montreal and Toronto starting later this year, bringing the Celine Dion jukebox/Titanic parody to Dion’s home turf, while London’s popular Live Aid musical Just for One Day gets a Toronto run in 2025.
Filipino audiences love Miss Saigon—but should they? “Filipinos, is it time to retire Miss Saigon?” ask Dennis Gupa and Dada Docot in an opinion piece in Rappler that landed just as the popular Manila production of the show wrapped its recent run. Gupa and Docot recount the long history of critiques and protests against the musical, and argue that Filipino audiences should reconsider their own widespread fondness for the material: “Filipino participation in Miss Saigon reflects enduring issues of Asian orientalism in theater, film, and other avenues of expression, but the difference is that Filipinos appear to be willing participants in this orientalism. At the heart of Filipinos being cast in the main roles of Miss Saigon is the racist idea of Asian interchangeability—that Asians look alike.”
First Saudi-penned opera opens in Riyadh, reads the headline of a fascinating BBC story by Sebastian Usher. The new grand opera is “part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s massively ambitious plans to shift the kingdom into a new era, economically and socially,” Usher writes. Set in pre-Islamic Arabia and centering on a blue-eyed family matriarch who can see the future, Zarqa Al Yamama has a libretto by Saudi poet Saleh Zamanan and music by Australian composer Lee Bradshaw. The production, Usher notes, is part of a broader regional push to create “state-of-the-art venues and cultural initiatives” in the area: “The Saudi investment in developing its cultural heft in the region and beyond matches similar efforts in sport and other sectors. And there’s no doubt that there has been a genuine transformation—by no means welcomed by all Saudis—in many aspects of day-to-day life in the country.”
Big-name Japanese entertainment company Toho will launch a training program for musical theater writers in August. Lecturers in the program will include two Korean musical theater creators, and the participants will have a subsequent showing of their work in a December showcase. “This was planned and produced by Toho with the aim of nurturing musical writers and composers and raising the standard of musicals in Japan, and the articles of incorporation state ‘the development and improvement of Japanese film, theater, and video culture,’” notes the story in Japanese musical theater site Natalie (via Google Translate).
The internationally popular K-drama Crash Landing on You is also a successful musical—and it’s a hit outside of South Korea too. The Korean-language musical adaptation of Crash Landing on You returns to Tokyo in July after a successful engagement there in February.
Apparently the well-traveled musical Chicago has somehow never played Shanghai? That’s about to change, when Chicago stops in Shanghai for the first time in June as part of an international tour of China and Taiwan. As noted on the English-language website That’s, the production is commanding Broadway-level price tags: “Tickets are priced from RMB 880-1,080 [~$121-$150], but selling very fast” (italics theirs).
Learn more about how the trailblazing world travels of Chicago helped shape the global commercial theater industry in this story from a couple months ago:
With the award-winning Australian play Counting and Cracking lined up to for a New York run at the influential Public Theater, a story by Linda Morris in the Sydney Morning Herald highlights a recent string of thriving Aussie stage exports. “Australian theatre is riding a wave of international success,” Morris writes. “Counting and Cracking’s move follows the critical success of Sydney Theatre Company’s West End production of The Picture of Dorian Gray … Last year, playwright and former Sydney lawyer Suzie Miller won best new play at the Olivier awards, for Prima Facie. It also ran on Broadway.” Tracing four generations of a single family from Sri Lanka to exile in Australia, Counting and Cracking comes from Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theater, and, as noted in Morris’ story, the New York run came about when one of Oz’s biggest international theater producers, Michael Cassel, introduced Belvoir leader Eamon Flack to Public a.d. Oskar Eustis. (Cassel produced Dorian Gray and is gearing up to bring that show to New York next year.)
In the Spanish-language edition of Forbes, writer Manuela Rodríguez pens a Q&A with Pilar Gutiérrez, one of the principals of major Madrid musical producer SOM Produce, the company behind local stagings of Mamma Mia!, Cabaret, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and the city’s popular production of The Book of Mormon. “With these successful projects behind her, she highlights two lessons learned: musicals sell emotions and Spanish talent is growing every day,” writes Rodríguez (via Google Translate). My favorite bit from this conversations highlights how differently stories can resonate in different cultural contexts: Of The Book of Mormon, Gutiérrez says, “The message is … quite clear: how the place where you are born determines the conditions of your life.” That is… not what Americans take away from Book of Mormon, I don’t think.
I talked to Gutiérrez’s partner at SOM, Marcos Camára—plus several other major players in the local industry—for last week’s SPOTLIGHT STORY about the bustling musical market in Madrid:
