Welcome to your weekly guide to the global theater industry. New to Jaques? Check out this handy explainer.
So you’ve just taken your seat at a musical in a language you don’t speak. How do you follow along?
As someone who sees a lot of musicals abroad, I get asked pretty often about how I know what’s going on onstage. The answer is: It depends. (Also: Sometimes I don’t!)
During my visit to Seoul in 2024, for example, I checked out what was then the latest local revival of Maybe Happy Ending. This was a few months before the Broadway version began performances and a year before it won six Tony Awards, so the title wasn’t yet on the radar of international theatergoers the way it is now—and there were no translation options available.
What there was, however, was an extremely detailed, English-language plot summary on the musical’s Wikipedia page. That, combined with the show’s small cast of characters and relatively straightforward plot, made it all easy enough for me to follow that I, someone who speaks zero Korean, still cried like a baby at the end.
At the time, translation options weren’t generally available for any of the shows around town, including the two Broadway-scale, Korean-language musicals I saw that trip. But now, less than two years later, AI-powered subtitle glasses have become increasingly common in Seoul—matching a trend that has seen theater markets around the world set their sights on boosting tourist business by making shows more accessible to international travelers.
In this SPOTLIGHT STORY, I’ll highlight
the translation devices and services now common around the world, from surtitles to captions to audio description;
how they work and how much they cost to implement;
the biggest provider of translation and accessibility services on Broadway (and beyond);
the Japanese musical genre making a point of attracting global audiences with more than just supertitles; and
which translation technique I’ve come to believe is the best of the current options, and why.
TEMPTING TOURISTS WITH TRANSLATION
Both Broadway and the West End count international tourism as a major driver of ticket sales: During the 2024-25 Broadway season, a whopping 20% of audiences hailed from other countries. Over in the U.K., nearly one in four international visitors to London took in a West End show in 2024.
No other theater markets in the world draw so many global travelers. But in recent years, some of them have been given reason to try:
