ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS FOR SEPT. 3, 2024
Edinburgh Fringe tallies, more legal wrangling over Madrid's Malinche, Ivo van Hove's former artistic home cuts ties, 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.
The end of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe spurred a flurry of wrap-ups and round-ups after the fest closed Aug. 26 with 2.61 million tickets sold to 3,746 shows. “The final week of the festival was overshadowed by Creative Scotland’s announcement that it had been forced to close its Open Fund for Individuals—one of its key funds—because the Scottish government was not releasing £6.6m as it had promised to,” Fergus Morgan reports in his coverage; more on the protests that came in response in this story in the Guardian. Meanwhile, The Stage has an interview with Edinburgh Fringe chief Shona McCarthy, who “hailed this year’s Edinburgh Fringe as a ‘huge success,’ but warned the festival’s future is ‘unsustainable’ without more funding from the Scottish government.
The Stage also named its Fringe Five 2024 winners, including the writer-star of the buzzy queer Cyrano, Virginia Gay.
Plus it’s got a handy winners list from all the awards doled out by the many organizations that honor standout shows each year. Big winners in 2024 include Khawla Ibraheem’s play about life in Gaza, A Knock On The Roof (already set to play New York later this season), and Brian Watkins’ black eco-comedy Weather Girl.
The Week has a list of some of the Fringe shows you’ll be able to catch in follow-up runs later this year (primarily in London), including that Cyrano (playing London in December). Not mentioned: I’m Almost There, the whimsical Todd Almond musical that will get a run at Off Broadway’s Minetta Lane Theatre prior to its release on digital audio via Audible.
The New York Times chronicles one American performer’s first Edinburgh Fringe experience and what she learned over the course her weeklong run.
In that paper’s Critic’s Notebook about the Fringe, Houman Barekat notes that a “conspicuous number of shows were themed around psychological maladies,” but beyond the trauma monologues he applauded shows including the absurdist L’Addition and the Beckettian Bellringers—both, as noted in The Week, slated for London runs this fall. In an earlier round-up, Barekat saw both musicals about the Gwyneth Paltrow ski trial, and gave a thumbs-up to I Wish You Well: The Gwyneth Paltrow Ski-Trial Musical.
Catch up on Jaques’ Fringe coverage with this story about how producers and artists are strategizing around the high-cost risk of a Fringe run:
In the latest development in the legal wrangling over hiring practices at Madrid’s successful and controversial musical Malinche, a group of Mexican dancers in the cast of Malinche filed restraining orders against the Spanish police after previously filing complaints against the police for coercion and document falsification. In July, Nacho Cano, the creator-composer-producer of Malinche, was arrested for illegally hiring immigrants to work on the show; the Mexican scholarship students’ request for a restraining order comes after what 20Minutos describes as “ ‘coercion, threats, falsification of documents and illegal detention,’ acts that supposedly occurred on June 27 when the police took their statements.”
The International Theater Amsterdam cut all ties to internationally renowned director Ivo van Hove “just weeks after a report said that a ‘culture of fear’ had developed under van Hove’s leadership and that he allowed bullying to go unchecked,” reporter Alex Marshall writes in the New York Times. After 20 years as the theater’s artistic director, van Hove (A View From the Bridge, A Little Life) stepped down last year but had remained attached as a paid artistic advisor with creative projects on the docket. As recounted by Marshall, studies and interviews suggest that van Hove’s international success led to frequent absences from the institution, allowing a hostile environment to flourish. “[Theater critic] Marijn Lems … said that he did not expect the scandal would have an impact on van Hove’s international standing. But, he added, it had seriously dented the director’s image in the Netherlands,” Marshall writes.
The new play Salesman in China is earning raves at the Stratford Festival in Canada, with J. Kelly Nestruck writing in The Globe and Mail that “this inaugural large-scale production could be picked up and proudly presented on any major international stage tomorrow.” Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy’s play, co-produced by the National Creation Fund at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa (where the production will play starting in January), details the backstory of a 1983 Mandarin-language staging of Death of a Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. In the Toronto Star, Joshua Chong singles out Singaporean actor Adrian Pang for “a stupendous performance” (as Ying Ruocheng, the Chinese actor who played Willy Loman) in a backstage drama that “could become a landmark piece of Canadian theatre.” Critics characterize the piece as a fascinating exploration of the promise and limits of theater as diplomacy, with Nestruck describing it as “a piece of bilingual, intercultural theatre—with well-located easy-to-read projected subtitles in English when the characters speak Mandarin and vice versa—that smartly interrogates its own form.”
Ben West, the musical theater scholar and author of the book The American Musical: Evolution of an Art Form, recently launched a new digital journal, The Musical Theater Report, and one of its first posts spotlights the 1920s musicals that introduced Broadway-style musical theater to the world long before Cats. Among the productions that West highlights are the 1923 title Little Jesse James (small cast, single set, jazz band), which played a year in New York and went on to Budapest and Berlin; No, No, Nanette (1925), seen in markets including England, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, India, and China; and Chocolate Kiddies, a Black musical “written and rehearsed in America but specifically designed to tour Europe.”
The Korea Times has a feature on Aladdin’s upcoming run in Seoul, spotlighting a conversation with big Disney names including composer Alan Menken, director Casey Nicholaw and Disney Theatrical Group’s EVP and Executive Producer Anne Quart. The curtain-raising conversation about Aladdin lays the groundwork for a show that’s taken a decade to make it to South Korea, where runs are typically shorter than the longer, sit-down style engagements now common to Disney in international markets including Hamburg and Madrid. In interviews, Menken, Nicholaw and Quart discuss casting choices, explain some of the differences between the musical and the movie, and tease which local tchotchke will appear in the Seoul production: “When Aladdin raises its curtains around the world, Genie whimsically incorporates a local souvenir into each show—a miniature Statue of Liberty on Broadway, a Union Jack umbrella in the U.K. and a jar of Vegemite in Australia. So, what unique memento will appear in Korea?”
Meanwhile, the actress Jung-won Choi, one of Seoul’s big musical theater stars, is stepping into the role of Hermes in Hadestown, and the Korea Times has an interview with her about the role and about her career in musicals. “Choi stands as a trailblazing figure in the Korean theater scene, particularly for female actors who face limitations as they age. At 55, not only does she continue to captivate audiences, but she also juggles two contrasting characters in two of Seoul's hottest shows now—Velma in Chicago and Hermes in Hadestown—thanks to Korea’s unique alternating principal role system,” writes Mee-yoo Kwon.
The Madrid run of an Argentinian production of Come From Away highlights a musical theater pipeline that’s evolved between the two Spanish-speaking countries, as a story in BroadwayWorld Spain points out. Writer Juan-Jose Gonzalez notes that Kinky Boots, Next to Normal and Piaf are among the productions that have arrived in Madrid after a run in Buenos Aires. (Going in the other direction, Madrid’s popular production of The Phantom of the Opera is gearing up for a Latin American tour, according to production company LetsGo.)
Learn more about Madrid’s booming theater market in my deep-drive from May:
AND DON’T FORGET
I’m on a hiatus from SPOTLIGHT STORIES (like this favorite of mine in which musical theater translators, working in five languages across three continents, reveal their trials, tricks and tools of the trade) so paid subscriptions are temporarily paused. That means that billing cycles are currently frozen for both monthly and annual subscribers; they’ll resume (with ample warning) in the fall with the first of the SPOTLIGHT STORIES I’ve got on deck for Jaques Year 2.
In the meantime, these ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS will continue to land in your inbox every other week. See you in a fortnight.