ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS FOR MAY 27, 2025
Macbeth in a videogame in Cannes, Matt Doyle in The Great Gatsby in Seoul, The Lion King in its final days in Toronto, 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.
Co-produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, a videogame version of Macbeth that transplants the Shakespearean tragedy to modern-day Iran is the first traditional videogame entry to be a part of the Festival de Cannes’ Immersive Competition. Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who won Cannes Film Festival’s 2022 award for best actress for her work in the film Holy Spider, stars in the interactive experience co-produced by the RSC and New York-based game studio iNK Stories. Called Lili, the game “weaves live-action footage with video game mechanics,” writes Lewis Packwood in The Guardian. The story imagines Lady Macbeth “as the ambitious wife of an upwardly mobile officer in the Basij (a paramilitary volunteer militia within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard in Iran).” According to Packwood, “the RSC’s [Director Of Creative Innovation] Sarah Ellis says that it might well be turned into a play at some point in the future. [iNK Stories co-founder] Navid [Khonsari] says there are already plans for a film version, using some of the same footage shot for the game—a reminder that the boundaries between the worlds of gaming, movies and theatre are increasingly porous.”
Tony-winning actor Matt Doyle will headline the English-language staging of The Great Gatsby in Seoul this summer. As reported in outlets including The Korea Times, Doyle, who won a 2022 Tony Award for his performance in Company, will star as the title character alongside Senzel Ahmady, a veteran of the Aladdin North American tour. The Great Gatsby, which premiered on Broadway and is also now playing in the West End, is being shepherded around the world by Chunsoo Shin, the Korean producer who is the head of OD Company. This new English-language staging of the musical (Aug. 1-Nov. 9) is a precursor to a Korean-language version coming to Seoul next year. “I wanted to deliver the full scale and performance of the original production of The Great Gatsby to Korean audiences just as it is,” Shin says in a quote in The Korea Times. “This is not a touring production—it is an original production tailored exclusively for Korean audiences, developed by adopting and further advancing the Broadway system.”
Turns out Toronto’s sit-down production of The Lion King won’t sit-down for long: Mirvish Productions’ staging shutters Aug. 30. “It’s a shorter run than many expected for a production of its caliber, but the company’s director of sales says producers determined it was better to close the show on ‘a really high note’ than gamble with uncertainties that may come up later this year,” according David Friend in The Canadian Press. One reason offered for the early closing: reduced cross-border tourism in the new political climate. When it finishes, the Toronto production of The Lion King will have played 345 shows over a total of 43 weeks. For the Mirvishes, it’s the second pricey local production to end early after a $25 million staging of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child that closed in 2023 after a disappointing 13 months.
Mumbai’s Nita Mukesh Ambiani Cultural Centre will bring a weekend of programming to New York City this fall with India Weekend, running Sept. 12-14 at Lincoln Center in Manhattan. Alongside food, retail and yoga offerings will be the American premiere of The Great Indian Musical: Civilization to Nation, a homegrown musical billed as “a spectacular tribute to India’s past, present and future that travels the country’s history from 5000 BC until its independence in 1947,” featuring “a cast of over 100 performers, opulent costumes and larger-than-life sets.” The show will be performed in multiple Indian languages with “narration and subtitles for international audiences.”
The Spanish musical Los Pilares de la Tierra (The Pillars of the Earth) hit 200 performances this month but will end its run in Madrid June 1, according to Lorena Pastor Romero in BroadwayWorld Spain. The show from beon. Entertainment—one of the Madrid’s most ambitious producers of original musicals—was conceived with grand plans to tour in an immersive staging; when and if those plans come to fruition remains to be seen.
I wrote about the typographically idiosyncratic beon. Entertainment and the premiere of Los Pilares de la Tierra back when the show opened in November:
The stage adaptation of the Hindi-language Bollywood hit Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge starts performances at Manchester Opera House in the U.K. on May 29. As part of the run-up to the first performance of Come Fall in Love—The DDLJ Musical, the film’s original star, Shah Rukh Khan, made an unannounced visit to the London rehearsals for the musical, according to Naman Ramachandran in Variety. The musical—directed by the film’s original director, Aditya Chopra, with choreography by Broadway veteran Rob Ashford—originally premiered at the Old Globe in San Diego in 2022, and has a score that features “18 all-new English songs created by acclaimed Indian music duo Vishal and Sheykhar” with book and lyrics by American writer Nell Benjamin (Legally Blonde, Mean Girls).
The “roller-skating nun opera” Sancta was the talk of Theatertreffen, Berlin’s annual showcase of the best theater in the German-speaking world. Created by the Austrian director-choreographer Florentina Holzinger, the show, a reworking of Paul Hindesmith’s 1922 opera Sancta Susanna, features sequences that have shocked and sickened audiences. To wit: “Naked performers kiss, grope, and grind against a towering metal crucifix. Roller-skating nuns glide along a halfpipe and karate kick suspended metal sheets. In one stomach-churning scene, a strip of skin is sliced from a performer’s chest, fried and fed to another cast member in a techno-scored tableau evoking the Last Supper,” writes Emily J. May in The New York Times. In May’s opinion, the shock-and-awe approach “backfires” because “the relentless barrage of subversive scenes means that, over the show’s nearly three-hour run time, it’s easy to become desensitized.” For an alternate take, check out my fellow Substacker
’s review of the show: “arguably it is shocking, but it’s so much richer and more moving than that, a profoundly joyous experience.”Frank Wildhorn’s musical adaptation of the manga and anime Death Note returns to Tokyo later this year, marking the 10th anniversary of the 2015 musical that has also been a hit in South Korea, where the show won the Korean Musical Award for best musical in 2022. The show also had a successful limited run in London in 2023. For the upcoming Japanese production in November, “Kenji Urai and Megumi Hamada, the original cast members from the original production, will be returning for the first time in eight years,” according to the announcement from production company Horipro.
Death Note is one of several international successes from American composer Wildhorn. I talked to him about his work and the state of the global theater industry in this story from last year:
AND ICYMI
Last week I covered a small-scale show finding big success across the U.S. and around the world:
HOW AN OFF BROADWAY VAMPIRE COMEDY FOUND FANS AROUND THE WORLD
The grassroots popularity of Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors, explained.