ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS FOR MAY 28, 2024
Banderas back to Broadway in 2025, a new Audrey Hepburn musical in Madrid, Mirvish skips out on Toronto theater 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? Get the scoop here.
Antonia Banderas told the Spanish press he’ll return to Broadway in 2025. As reported in the Spanish-language paper ABC and other outlets, Banderas broke the news while announcing that the theater he founded in Màlaga, Teatro del Soho, has re-upped its deal with Caixabank, which will invest €1 million annually in the theater for the next three years. He also announced his intentions to make Teatro del Soho “an Andalusian Broadway.” “In the coming years I want to produce more of my own musicals. Scripts and works by authors from here. There is talent for that,” Banderas told ABC (quoted via Google Translate). No word yet on what project will bring Banderas back to Broadway more than 20 years after his starring role in the 2003 revival of “Nine.” In the meantime, his most recent outing as a stage director, Teatro del Soho’s Tocando nuestra canción (They’re Playing Our Song), starts performances June 6, and he’ll stage the Spanish-language premiere of Gypsy there later this year.
A new musical about Audrey Hepburn will premiere in Madrid in February 2025, produced by Since1953 Productions with the actress’ son Sean Hepburn. Called Buscando a Audrey (Looking for Audrey), the show will have a book by José Ignacio Salmerón and an original score by film composer Fernando Velázquez (The Orphanage, A Monster Calls). “It is not [a] classic musical telling the biography of her life,” Sean Hepburn tells Time Out Madrid (via Google Translate). “When my mother was asked to write her biography, she always answered: ‘Nothing has happened to me. I just went to work and people liked it.’ So we have prepared a script with deep cinematic roots that permanently evokes her life and work.” Looking for Audrey will inaugurate a new performance venue in Madrid, with details on that still to come.
Meanwhile, musical theater musicians in Madrid have organized a labor collective. With 250 members and counting, the Coordinadora de Músicos de Teatro Musical (Coordinating Committee of Musical Theater Musicians) has banded together to push back against unfair working conditions. As El País describes it (via Google Translate), “they do not even have a fixed minimum working day, salary schedule, seniority or specific compensation for dismissal, medical leave or adapted vacations.” Journalist Ruth Diaz also reports that some productions in the city use recorded music tracks without the knowledge of the paying audience.
Learn more about Spain’s bustling musical theater scene in my recent SPOTLIGHT STORY about it:
Canada’s largest commercial musical theater producer, Mirvish Productions, will opt out of the prominent Dora Awards now that Mirvish has withdrawn from the organization that administers the awards, the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts. The “departure represents a major shakeup for [TAPA] and its prestigious awards program, considered the oldest and largest in the country,” writes Joshua Chong in the Toronto Star, adding “Mirvish’s absence could also call into question the awards program’s scope and prestige.” A rep for Mirvish gave no reason for the exit from TAPA, which lost 46% of its members during lockdown and hasn’t yet returned to pre-pandemic levels.
“A Russian court on Monday [May 20] opened the trial of a theater director and a playwright accused of advocating terrorism in a play, the latest step in an unrelenting crackdown on dissent in Russia that has reached new heights since Moscow sent troops into Ukraine,” reports the Associated Press. “Zhenya Berkovich, a prominent independent theater director, and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk have been jailed for over a year. Authorities claim their play Finist, the Brave Falcon justifies terrorism, which is a criminal offense in Russia punishable by up to seven years in prison. Berkovich and Petriychuk have both repeatedly rejected the accusations against them. Berkovich told the court on Monday that she staged the play in order to prevent terrorism, and Petriychuk echoed her sentiment, saying that she wrote it in order to prevent events like those depicted in the play.”
Meet the robot stars of a new sci-fi musical in Seoul, A Thousand Blues, based on a popular, near-future novel by Cheon Seon-ran. The story of a humanoid jockey robot, Collie, and his horse, Today, uses puppets to portray the jockey and horse, but real robots play other characters, including a rescue robot named Darpa. “Alongside the quadruped robot GO2, developed by Unitree Robotics, which performs as Darpa in the show, other commercialized robots like Boston Dynamics’ four-legged Spot, indoor autonomous patrol robot Iroi and a self-driving patrol robot, Patrover, both developed by South Korean robotics company Dogu, make appearances in the musical, creating a vibrant depiction of a futuristic society,” writes Hwang Dong-hee in the Korea Herald.
There’s a new musical winning raves in Manila: Bar Boys, an adaptation of a 2017 Filipino film about a quartet of law students. Most reviews note that the movie’s no masterpiece, but the musical it inspired is “this year’s most affecting theater so far,” writes Jason Tan Liwag in Rappler. The Philippine Star calls it “heartwrenching, humorous, and inspiring,” and the Filipino edition of Esquire says it’s “an A+ exercise in adaptation.” With book and lyrics by Pat Valera and music and lyrics by Myke Salomon, the show “is not just a straightforward adaptation,” writes Pauline Miranda in lifestyle mag Nolisoli. “[T]he story of four friends going through their law school journey has transformed and evolved, made to fit and capture the context and sentiment of the present, of 2024.”
Japan’s famous all-female troupe generated a new round of headlines when a former Takarazuka Revue star was arrested over an alleged ¥10 million fraud. The Japan Times reports, “Authorities allege that in April 2019, [Terumi] Ogura, who currently goes by the stage name Emika Mitsuhara, deceived a female acquaintance in her 70s to invest ¥10 million [~$64,000] by telling her a lie that she was planning to produce a movie. … Instead, the funds were used to finance a dinner show, police said.” Separately, Takarazuka recently acknowledged all claims of harassment against a member of the troupe who died last year in a suspected suicide.
The Japan Times also has a look at English-language theater troupes in Japan, written by an British ex-pat who works as a journalist in Tokyo. Laura Pollaco describes the pleasures and challenges of acting with local companies like Tokyo International Players and Sheepdog Theatre on shows including Kate Hamill’s popular stage adaptation of Pride and Prejudice: “When taking part in a production, you are often giving up roughly six to 10 hours a week and double that closer to opening week to put on a show,” she writes. “Evening and weekend rehearsals can take over all your free time, and it can be exhausting. I’ve seen my friends take part in conference calls in the corner of the stage before rehearsal starts, open up laptops to finish work between scenes and even run straight from teaching to a dance rehearsal still wearing a suit and tie.” She loves it anyway: She’s currently in rehearsals for her fifth show.
Website AussieTheatre.com has a feature on Daniel Assetta, a young actor from Sydney who’s now in the Broadway ensemble of & Juliet, and his interview yields some interesting tidbits about how the Australian theater business operates differently than in the U.S. “Even the way an audition room is run is different,” Assetta says, adding that the business in the U.S. is a lot more crowded and active than it is Down Under: “Last year alone I had over 50 auditions, which is more than I’ve had in my entire career back home.” Among the other differences: On Broadway, he says, “They have a 30 minute call to arrive at the theatre, where you are straight into dressing rooms to get into microphones and costumes for the show, as opposed to the hour call time and the full company vocal and physical warm up we usually have in Australia.”