/ARTS WEEKLY/THEATRE-CHINA: Broadway Musicals Draw in the Crowds

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Apr 15 2003 (IPS) - In Broadway and London’s West End, musicals may have bid farewell to the crowds and the days of standing ovations, but in China, the musical is the hottest thing to happen in the culture circles here.

Long frowned upon by China’s communist arbiters of taste for their pure fun and indulgence in stage glamour, musicals seem to have become hot property for today s cultural mandarins. State planners have embarked on plans to build grandiose Opera Theatre in Beijing – and have only just realised that such a glamorous venue would require a fitting repertoire as well.

Last year, a special team of officials from the Culture Ministry went on a pilgrimage to Broadway to study first-hand and emulate the success of smash Western musicals in China. A potpourri of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musicals, which became a runaway success in 2001, had convinced Chinese cultural gurus that musicals have enormous market potential.

”When ‘Titanic’ hit one billion dollars in box office income, ‘Phantom of the Opera’ had already earned more than 2.7 billion dollars,” notes the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, ‘The People s Daily’.

Not only cultural officials have been dazzled by market prospects. Audiences have been equally enthusiastic about Broadway blockbusters. Brought up in a culture where the traditional form of theatre Chinese opera is music driven and rigorously stylised, Chinese have taken to the musicals not only for their sing-along melodies but also for their flamboyant beauty.

Despite their fear about a new strain of deadly pneumonia in the capital, this month Beijing residents packed the hall of Century Theatre to see ‘Lady in the Dark’, the first Broadway-style musical of its size to be put on in Beijing by both Chinese and foreign performers.

Tickets for Shanghai’s Mar. 28 premiere of the hit musical ‘Cats’, Broadway’s longest-running show, sold out in a matter of hours and only a few seats remain for performances running through to mid-May. The approximately 80,000 tickets for 53 planned performances are 90 percent sold, reported the local newspaper ‘Shanghai Daily’.

In Beijing, a front-row ticket for the ‘Cats’ premiere on May 20, fetched a record price of 8,000 dollars at an auction. Liu Yushan, a businessman from the coastal city of Qingdao, said the performance was worth more than the price he paid because ‘Cats’ was not showing in Broadway and West End any longer. ”I love musicals and I really love ‘Cats’,” Liu told Chinese media during the auction.

”Musicals will be the highlight of Chinese stage in 2003,” predicts Zhang Yu, general manager of the China Performing Arts Agency, which together with Britain’s Really Useful Group is bringing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Cats’ to Shanghai and Beijing.

Tickets for the regular shows reach up to 1,200 yuan (150 dollars), more than an average monthly salary in Beijing, but Zhang is confident the performance will make profits. ”All you need is good marketing,” he says.

‘Cats’ comes on the heels of ‘Les Miserables’ and ‘Notre Dame de Paris’, which were staged in both cities last year. Next year, another of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s celebrated works – ‘Phantom of the Opera’ – will be presented in the bustling port city of Shanghai.

The Shanghai Conservatory has also set up country’s first musical department to train China’s future musical performers.

”Shanghai is to become China’s centre for musicals,” says Shanghai Grand Theatre manager Hu Xuehua. Lavishly built, Shanghai Grand Theatre, which raised the curtains in 1998, is by far the only venue in all of China capable of staging a full Broadway musical.

However, Beijing officials were reluctant to cede the opportunity for showing musical extravaganza solely to their rival metropolis. As the planned Beijing Opera house will not open its doors until 2005, authorities allowed ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ to be performed at the Great Hall of the People – a Stalinist-style building where the Chinese legislature holds its annual sessions.

For the staging of ‘Cats’, which will run for two months, special renovations of Tianqiao Tea House have been undertaken. The venue however, seems to matter little for many new fans of the musical genre here.

”I found the artistic form of musical very refreshing compared to many musical forms we Chinese are used to,” says Yang Haitang, an art teacher in an international school in Beijing. Yang saw ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ earlier this year and was deeply impressed by the beauty of the performance. ”’There was nothing plain about it. Everything from costumes to props and dances was splendid.”

While traditional Chinese opera dazzles the eye with magnificent costumes, it relies mostly on imagination and stylised movements to create a scene or convey a mood. Watching the western musicals, young Chinese audiences are finding it liberating to indulge in an unashamed display of splendour.

Nancy Fraser, one of the producers of the musical ‘Lady in the Dark’, says enthusiasm for musicals among Chinese extends to many of them willing to take part in staging a show. ‘Lady in the Dark’ is a cross-cultural event, which pulls together professional and amateur artists from China and abroad.

”We sensed an unsatisfied demand,” Nancy says of the organisers’ decision to stage a locally produced Broadway musical. ”Young professional Chinese are hungry for new artistic forms and very open to dipping their toes in new things.”