ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS FOR DEC. 24, 2024
Panto's popularity, Malinche in Mexico City, Wildhorn's new work, 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.
Pantos like Peter Pan at the Palladium are presently pretty popular. Annual holiday-season pantomimes are a major economic driver for the U.K. theater industry, similar to the way A Christmas Carol can be a cash-cow for American nonprofits, and this year has been an especially good one for pantos: “Pantomime producers have reported increased ticket sales since the pandemic lockdowns began, hailing the increases as being ‘back to business,’” writes Georgia Luckhurst in The Stage. One of the biggest panto producers out there, Crossroads Live, is wrapping up a record-breaking year of 4.5 million tickets sold across its 39 productions and 23 pantomimes (including the aforementioned Peter Pan at the London Palladium), while the company’s upcoming 2025 production of Aladdin at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle hit £1.5 million in ticket sales in just four days. Execs at Evolution Productions, meanwhile, say that “the company’s 10 pantos were currently selling so well that they were ‘on average’ around 3,000 tickets up in each venue compared with previous years.”
Perplexed by panto? Peep this primer:
Pantos are big beyond Britain, too: A CBC story by Aisling Murphy charts the rise of the form in Canada, and looks at the return this year of producer Ross Petty to the annual Toronto panto tradition he helped establish.
And speaking of internationally popular holiday shows: In the New York Times, Andrew Higgins and Jenny Gross report on the controversy around the decision made by Lithuania’s national opera house to stop programming Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker as a show of solidarity with Ukraine. When the country’s newly appointed cultural minister said he likes listening to Tchaikovsky, “[h]is remarks prompted fury from ardent supporters of Ukraine and applause from lovers of Russian music, igniting a bitter debate, largely one between generations, about whether culture and politics can be separated at a time of war.”
El País reports that Spanish musical Malinche will open in Mexico City in March 2025. The musical by Nacho Cano, the former member of the uber-popular Spanish pop act Mecano, has already found success in Madrid, where the show premiered in 2022 and is now in its third season (notching 800 performances so far and 600,000 tickets sold, according to El País). In Mexico City, Banco Azteca will present the show in partnership with Cano and executive producers María Laura Medina de Salinas and David Hatchwell. The musical reframes the story of La Malinche, the Nahua woman who served as Hernán Cortes’ translator during his conquest of the Aztecs, as a celebration of mestizaje, the racial and cultural mixing precipitated by this early meeting of two cultures. It’s a controversial take on a controversial figure, and Cano himself has been arrested (but then subsequently released) on charges of illegally hiring immigrants to work on the show. We’ll find out how Mexican audiences and critics receive Malinche when the production, with a cast of 50+, opens at Frontón México in CDMX on March 28, 2025.
Internationally popular composer Frank Wildhorn is working on a new musical called Van Gogh in Love, teaming with American book writer Rinne B. Groff and Korean director-producer Pilyoung Oh for a production that will bow at Emotional Theatre in Seoul. A press release from Wildhorn’s team describes Van Gogh in Love as the composer’s “first foray into intimate performance spaces” in a career best-known for large-scale musical outings including Jekyll & Hyde and Death Note. Wildhorn currently has three shows running in Seoul (Jekyll & Hyde, Cyrano, Mata Hari) with a fourth (The Man Who Laughs) bowing there next month. Meanwhile, the exact production timeline for the developing Van Gogh in Love has yet to be set.
More than 60 playwrights, actors, producers and directors were expected to attend the Almasi African Playwrights conference earlier this month in Harare, Zimbabwe, writer Tawanda Mudzonga reports in the Guardian. The conference is the annual, headline event of Almasi Collaborative Arts, the organization co-founded by writer-actor Danai Gurira (The Walking Dead, Black Panther) in 2011. “Gurira set up Almasi with film and theatre producer Patience Tawengwa to give Zimbabwean creatives access to the sort of training and skills that she has benefited from since being in the U.S.,” Mudzonga writes. Since its launch in 2015, the playwrights conference has helped developed 20 plays. One major obstacle to talent development in the region: “Many of the 500 or so artists Almasi has trained have left the profession because of poor pay.”
Major Japanese production company Toho celebrated its first Musical Theater Writing Program, a development initiative for rising talent, with a showcase performance earlier this month. A story from Pia reports (via Google Translate) that during the three-week program back in August, “14 participants aspiring to become musical creators learned the basics and applications of musical writing and composition from a lecturer invited from the Korea National University of Arts.” This month, three of those participating creator groups were selected to join with three groups each from training programs in the U.S., the U.K., and South Korea to present songs from shows they’re working on. According to the story, the Songwriters SHOWCASE on Dec. 18 “proceeded with the creators themselves appearing and presenting the content of their work, after which a stellar cast of actors from Japan and Korea sang” in what the story describes as a “trade fair” that could “greatly develop the Japanese musical world.”
Prolific Filipino producer-director Bobby Garcia has died at 55. As Margaret Hall notes in Playbill, Garcia “was active across numerous international markets, founding one of Asia’s most prolific theatre companies while establishing an extensive working relationship with Lea Salonga.” I spoke to Garcia, also a producer on the Broadway production of Here Lies Love, earlier this fall for my story about theater in the Philippines. His latest project in Manila, Request sa Radyo starring Salonga and Dolly de Leon, was the first production of an ongoing producing initiative to make top-tier theater in Manila and bring together talent from across the Filipino diaspora. No word yet on how Garcia’s death will impact the initiative’s upcoming activities.
There’s so much happening in the Philippines’ theater market, it took me two stories to cover it properly:
The Indian movie-turned-musical Mughal-e-Azam is fast approaching 300 performances with an upcoming run at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre in Mumbai and then a performance at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Delhi. “The show features over 550 exquisite costumes, majestic sets, live singing, and dazzling Kathak choreography, and is celebrated as one of the most extravagant in the history of Indian theatre,” according to a story from Indo-Asian News Service. Produced by Deepesh Salgia and funded by the Indian conglomerate Shapoorji Pallonji, the Broadway-style show’s 300th perf (since its 2016 premiere in Mumbai) counts as something of a landmark in India, where runs are much shorter than the longer engagements common to Broadway and the West End.
AND ICYMI
From hit to flop to hit again: A new Paris production of Les Misérables has redeemed the musical for French audiences and critics who have mostly dismissed the show in the past. Here’s how it happened—and what’s next for the production.
