In another word
Broadway classics make their way in Shanghai in Mandarin
Major production companies and established artists from Broadway and the West End have announced they will be collaborating on a slew of musical coproduction projects in China.
A new production of Beauty and the Beast in Chinese premiered at the Walt Disney Grand Theatre in Shanghai on June 14, led by the creative team behind the original Broadway show, including playwright Linda Woolverton, director Rob Roth and set designer Stanley Meyer.
The production follows The Lion King as the resident show at the Walt Disney Grand Theatre, part of the Shanghai Disney Resort. While it wasn’t revealed how many shows were planned for the Chinese production of Beauty and the Beast, its predecessor The Lion King ran for 500 shows before it closed in October 2017.
“This is the best version of the show,” said Rob Roth, who was nominated for a Tony Award as best director for Beauty and the Beast in 1994, which marked his Broadway debut. Roth has since worked on more than 20 different versions of the musical in several different languages.
“As an artist, I always want to keep pushing forward. You learn more each time you perform a show,” he told China Daily in Shanghai. “This latest production has a better structure ... and the lighting and music are also much better than the last production, which ended six years ago.”
Woolverton has been involved in the Chinese production from the very beginning. When the script was first translated into Chinese, she had asked for it to be translated back into English to ensure everything was correct. She made changes and offered suggestions to the director on how to improve the musical in a bid to guarantee the production remained true to her vision.
Both Woolverton and Roth were very much impressed with the ability of the Chinese actors, who she praised for being “spot-on and disciplined”, and for giving “heartfelt and emotional” performances.
Roth said that it took them a while to find the Chinese actors, “because musical theater doesn’t have such a long history here as it does in the US,” he said. But once they started to work together he was surprised at “how quickly they understood the ideas,” and he said their performances “more than matched Broadway in terms of quality”.
“I wanted to create the show together with the actors, rather than just teach them how to do it,” Roth said, adding that he was happy that the actors “brought their own ideas, which made the show so much better.”
In contrast to The Lion King, which was a modern theatrical production, featuring fantastic puppetry and visual effects, Beauty and the Beast is an “old-fashioned Broadway show”, consisting mainly of singing, dancing and comedy, Roth said. His opening-night nerves about the production soon faded when he saw how audiences responded to the performance with huge bouts of laughter and overwhelming applause. “I hope this play will usher in a wave of musical theater productions in China, and I hope it will make people want to see more Broadway shows in Chinese.”
Earlier this month on June 7, the Shanghai Media Group Live and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group held a news conference at the Shanghai Grand Theatre announcing the launch of their Phantom China Project.
The project consists of a series of plans, starting with “the largest scale China tour” of The Phantom of the Opera in 2020, a reality show to find musical talent in China, as well as the production of The Phantom of the Opera in Chinese.
Webber was in New York to accept a lifetime achievement prize at the Tony Awards, and was therefore unable to attend the event in Shanghai.
Instead Sarah Brightman, the British star soprano and original star who played Christine in the first production of Phantom, joined the news conference, and shared the story of how her career took off with the musical. “I hope Phantom will continue to launch careers in China, and whoever wins the talent show will not only have the opportunity to play in the Chinese version, they will be rewarded in ways they couldn’t imagine,” she said. Brightman will be one of the talent show judges, which will undertake a nationwide search for an actor to play the lead role in the Chinese production of Phantom. A TV production about the talent show will be broadcast in 2020.
The collaboration between SMG Live and RUG began last year, with the two hosting a series of training programs for musical talent in Shanghai last November, when professional musical actors and aspiring young students spent 20 days training with experienced tutors from London.
Later this month, the second installment of the programs will take place again in Shanghai.
The first joint production between SMG Live and RUG was Webber’s Chinese version of Tell Me On A Sunday, which was performed at the Majestic Theatre in Shanghai from June 8-16.
Jessica Koravos, president of RUG, said that the production “marks an exciting crosspollination of skills and resources between the UK and China to grow the global industry.”
“This project has nurtured cooperation across every discipline — script and lyric writing, stagecraft and technical work, marketing, creative development, musicianship and performance, and costume design — it’s been exciting to collaborate with Chinese designers,” Koravos said.
The first Andrew Lloyd Webber musical to be performed in Shanghai was Cats in 2003, when it ran for 53 shows at the Shanghai Grand Theatre, said Zhang Xiaoding, general manager of the SGT. In 2004, the Phantom of the Opera made history at the theater by making 100 consecutive full-house performances. “The record is still waiting to be broken, and hopefully with the combined efforts of SMG Live and RUG, we will make that happen,” Zhang said.
Webber’s latest musical creation, School of Rock, will tour China in 2019, with its opening performance scheduled to take place at the Shanghai Grand Theatre next February.