They have cheered in their droves at Les Miserables, tapped their feet to 42nd Street and purred their delight at Cats. Now Beijing is to cement its love of musicals by building “China’s new Broadway,” a complex of 32 theaters to rival those of New York and London.
The Beijing Daily newspaper announced on Tuesday that the city’s sprawling northwest suburb of Haidian — home to schools and universities, as well as the prestigious high-tech industrial park of Zhongguancun — is to demolish another chunk of aging tenements over the next six months to make room for the complex, which will include a flagship theater with a capacity of 2,000, and another 31 venues of various shapes, styles and sizes capable of holding between 300 and 500 people.
The complex will become “a Chinese Broadway base for composers, writers, performers and actors in training,” a spokesman for the developer said.
In recent years, Beijing has had the opportunity to taste lavish productions by the UK’s Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as painstaking translations of Chekhov, but the new theater complex appears to be aiming for the more profitable middle-brow audience. The Sound of Music has been popular in the capital for decades and more recently, shows by Andrew Lloyd Webber have been drawing big crowds in both Beijing and Shanghai.
There are already plenty of Western producers keen to play a part in China’s cultural development and claim a share in the gate receipts that might accompany it.
British impresario Sir Cameron Mackintosh — the producer of Lloyd Webber’s Cats as well as the West End blockbusters Les Miserables and Miss Saigon — signed an agreement with the China Arts and Entertainment Group last year to bring his musicals to China.
And the Beijing Shibo Group has entered into a separate agreement with Broadway company Nederlander to bring popular US musicals to China. Nederlander has already showed its willingness to cross the cultural divide by staging a translated production of the hit show Fame, in collaboration with local partners.
Beijing Shibo said it is planning to stage as many as 100 musicals at the new facilities, once construction is completed.
But in an editorial in the culture section of the People’s Daily, there was some lament over the end of an era. In Beijing’s theatrical heyday, venues were spread throughout the suburbs and were designed to bring enjoyment to the masses in a convenient way.
“In those days, residents living near the theatre either had to only walk a small distance or could even stay in their own street to watch a show. The theaters were built right next to their home,” the paper said.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS