In July 2002, the musical "Les Misérables" from Broadway in the United States was staged at the Shanghai Grand Theatre, and when the first performance was performed, the tickets did not sell well, and many seats were not sold. However, when the performance was over, the audience stood up and cheered for 15 minutes, and soon, the tickets for the next three weeks of the show were sold out, and in order to satisfy the enthusiasm of the audience, the last few shows even sold stand tickets.
Beginning with Les Misérables, Chinese audiences have come into contact with and fallen in love with a new art form such as musical theatre, and more importantly, the show has injected a new wind into the Chinese performance market, and since 2002, at least one world-class musical theater work has come to Shanghai every year. The success of "Les Misérables" has also affected the education sector, the musical theater department of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, the musical theater class of the Shanghai Theater Academy have been established in this context, the domestic musical theater talent training is on the right track, and the musical theater market has been able to take root and gradually mature.
As Chinese musicals enter their 20th year, we are pleased to see that musicals have occupied an increasingly important position in the current national performance market, especially in Shanghai, watching musicals after work and study has become a way of life. Whether it is "The Orphan of Zhao", "Romeo and Juliet", "The Hidden Corner" and other musicals relying on traditional theaters, or innovative environmental resident musicals such as "Apollonia", "Flame" and "Lighthouse", they have been warmly welcomed by the audience, and in terms of content and form, domestic original musicals have also made surprising leaps.
The city is full of musicals
At the end of 2020, when the musical theater people are happy and proud that there are 8 musicals on the market at the same time, I am afraid that I can't imagine that a year later, in Shanghai, almost all the theaters in the city are musical theater performances, and there are more than 10 resident musicals in this genre, including many large-scale productions that are of good quality and have high hopes for the theater. Taking the Shanghai Cultural Square, which mainly performs musicals, as an example, in this year's Wenguang "Year-end Drama", "Romeo and Juliet" and "Fan Letters" as the theater's self-made Chinese version of the musical debuted on the stage of the "Year-end Performance Season".
While traditional theater musicals are loved by audiences, environmentally-based musicals such as "Apollonia", "Flame" and "Lighthouse" have also won a loyal audience.
The Asia Building at No. 650 Hankou Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai, was originally an office building that has been idle for a long time, but now, this building has become the most intensive and popular theater viewing destination in Shanghai and even the whole country - at the end of 2018, the Shanghai Performance Industry Association proposed the construction of "Shanghai Performing Arts New Space", in addition to the traditional performance space of professional theaters, to guide and promote various venues to actively expand and create new formats, new models and new platforms for literary and artistic performances. Under the guidance of this idea, "Performing Arts World", as an important force for Shanghai to build "Asia's Performing Arts Capital", pioneered the new format model of "Star Space" and implanted the performing arts space into shopping malls.
Since August 28, 2020, the ambient musical "Apollonia" hung "Star Space No. 1" in the Asia Tower, the current "Star Space" of the Asia Building has increased to 14, and the number of performances has exceeded 2,000, and many people in the industry have joked that the Huanrenguang Theater Group with the Asia Tower as the core has become China's Broadway.
Because of the gathering of theaters and stages, the performance producers of Asia Tower flexibly adjusted the opening time, breaking the original fixed mode of 14:30 at noon and 19:30 at night. From 1 p.m. to 10 p.m., almost every half hour, there are good plays in the "Star Space", if you have a good plate of time, watch 4 performances a day. In fact, this is also based on the main force of musical theater audiences - the post-90s and post-00s work habits of the change, because many young audiences leave work late, and 22 o'clock is the most suitable time for them to watch.
Statistics show that for every $1 increase in the box office of Broadway in New York, it can attract additional revenue of $7 for surrounding regions and industries. In Shanghai, Asia Tower has also become more and more a new landmark of cultural tourism punch card, a holiday, the occupancy rate of nearby hotels climbed, many fans outside Shanghai dragged suitcases to the Asia Tower to watch musicals, after all, the play did not wait for people, the hotel dispersed and then went in time.
Intensive performances also provide a stage for domestic musical theater actors to perform. At the end of this year, in addition to Ayunga, Zheng Yunlong, Liu Lingfei and other musical theater stars, they sang the leading role in the Chinese version of "Luo Zhu", the Chinese version of the musical "Agatha", the original musical "Human Disqualification" and other large productions, and the musical theater performances and resident plays in small and medium-sized theaters also provided stable job opportunities for the actors. Wang Haigang, co-president of Happy Twist Group and general manager of Shanghai Happy Twist, lamented to Xinmin Weekly: "In the current market, musical theater actors are very busy, and many actors' plays are scheduled for the second half of the year. It turned out that his musical theater project "28 Days Before the Breakup" was expected to meet the audience on May Day this year, and the script and music had been prepared, but the schedule of inviting actors had become the biggest challenge for the current crew.
In the course of the reporter's interview, I also felt the busyness of the musical theater actors all the time: rehearsing this play in the morning, rehearsing the play in the afternoon, performing in the theater in the evening, and another play, in addition to the new play, there are various rehearsal plays, and many actors even have to roll the play, that is, perform in multiple public performances at the same time.
"Compared with foreign countries, our musical theater market is developing rapidly, one of the reasons is that we started late and have the advantage of being a latecomer; in addition, because of the epidemic, it is more difficult for foreign plays to enter the domestic performance market, and there is also a window period for the domestic original musical theater creation industry." According to An Dong, a professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and head of the Department of Musical Theater, there are many types of musical theaters on the market at present, "including small theater plays imported from abroad, especially south Korea; original musicals adapted by Chinese companies that buy IPs of foreign writers, such as the Keigo Higashino series; and there are also 100% original musicals adapted from the IP of domestic writers, such as the Zijin Chen series." Their market performance is very good, and they have also seen some attempts to localize the music script. In addition, suspenseful reasoning is an important theme in the existing repertoire."
The development of Chinese musical theater has come to a good time, Zhang Xiaoding, member of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and general manager of the Shanghai Grand Theatre, told Xinmin Weekly: "In the past 5 years, we have seen a lot of excellent works and outstanding talents, and we have also noticed that Shanghai has become an important town for the development of domestic musical theater, playing the role of a weather vane in the market - many works if they are not launched in Shanghai, then follow-up promotion will be difficult, on the contrary, if the response in Shanghai is enthusiastic, Then the chances of being noticed and introduced by theaters in other cities will be greatly improved, pushing them to open up the national market. ”
How can Shanghai become a fertile ground for the development of the musical theater market?
For the audience in Shanghai, the Western classic musicals represented by "Les Misérables" and "Phantom of the Theater" have brought them unprecedented audiovisual experience and a new understanding of drama.
And it is no accident that the first stop of the musical entering the Chinese mainland landed in Shanghai.
Qian Shijin, the driving force behind the introduction of Les Misérables to China and the former artistic director of the Shanghai Grand Theatre, had this idea as early as 1988 when he first went to the United States, but he did not have the opportunity to act until 1996, and later negotiated with the musical theater production company Mackintosh for five years, and finally signed a contract in 2001.
This was an extremely bold and risky decision, when the domestic music industry generally regarded musical theater as an unpopular and difficult art to be elegant. When the Grand Theatre introduced "Les Misérables", there was a lot of opposition, and many people in the industry believed that the introduction of "Les Misérables" could have "tragic" consequences.
In order to bring "Les Misérables" to Chinese audiences without discount, the Shanghai version of "Les Misérables" combines the characteristics of the two plays of London's West End and New York Broadway, the performance team is also composed of elite actors from both places, and the Grand Theatre has spent millions of dollars to airlift the original "props" of Broadway worth $4 million to Shanghai.
Later, the Grand Theatre had to introduce a musical with great fanfare every year, overcoming SARS in 2003 to introduce "Cats" (53 scenes), "The Sound of Music" in 2004 (35 scenes), "Phantom of the Theater" in 2005 (100 scenes), "The Lion King" (101 scenes) in 2006... "Since 2002, the Grand Theatre opened the Chinese mainland musical theater market, and has been committed to conveying the artistic charm of musical theater to the audience by introducing classic works to Chinese audiences. Broaden the horizons of Chinese audiences. Zhang Xiaoding said.
When the first batch of domestic audience groups were cultivated, the Shanghai Grand Theatre put forward the "three-step" strategy of musical theater in China, the first step is to introduce foreign classic musicals; the second step is to do the localization of musicals, that is, to produce Chinese versions of foreign classic musicals; the third step is to produce China's own original musical theater works, "These three steps are not necessarily carried out step by step, there may also be some parallelism and integration, and now looking back, the 20 years of the development of Chinese musical theater have followed such a step."
At the same time, Chinese musical theater-related majors and disciplines have also begun to be established, among which the Department of Music and Drama was formally established by the Shanghai Conservatory of Music as early as September 2002, and the talents cultivated have become the main group of domestic musical theater actors. An Dong told Xinmin Weekly: "Musical theater is a very high degree of marketization of the drama, students after graduation there is no national targeted theater group acceptance, so at the beginning of the establishment of the department, Shangyin decided that talent training must be oriented to the market, so far, the Department of Music and Drama has trained nearly 600 music and drama students." It is proud that, as far as we know, in the current domestic musical theater market, the proportion of Shangyin graduates serving as the main actors is about 1/3, which is quite high. ”
When musical theater-related talents gather in Shanghai, musical theater has gradually become a city business card of Shanghai, and the audience is of course the most indispensable protagonist on this business card. Cameron Mackintosh, the producer of the four famous plays, once said: "The future of musical theater in China depends on the Chinese audience, not on us." ”
Chen Dong, former deputy director of the Propaganda Department of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee and director of the Shanghai Cultural Research Center of Shanghai University, is probably one of the first audiences in China to contact musicals, and in her opinion, the biggest feature of Shanghai audiences is that they have a strong ability to accept new things and are very willing to pay real money and silver for this. "At the beginning of the last century, Liyuan line had the saying that 'Beijing sat in class, Tianjin sang red, Shanghai made money', and the price of Jiao'er to Shanghai was higher than that in Beijing, but the field was still full. Therefore, when the musical theater, a new stage form, was introduced to China, it also took the lead in opening up the situation in Shanghai. Chen Dong said.
Shanghai audiences also like to delve into it, and if there are different performance teams for the same play, they are also very willing to enter the theater to compare. Chen Dong recalled: "One year, Shanghai introduced German, British, and Russian ballet companies to perform the same dance drama "Romeo and Juliet" within a month, and Guangzhou could not sell, Beijing could not sell, Shanghai sold. What does this mean? It shows that the Shanghai audience is the group of people who are most willing to spend money to taste fresh and see different in our national performance market. This feature is also very distinct in the musical theater market, such as the recent "Human Disqualification", Bai Jugang and Liu Lingfei are acting in tandem, and many viewers even brush two or even more brushes in order to see the actor's interpretation of different roles. ”
Audiences are able to enjoy different types of musical theatre productions, which is a sign that the market is maturing. According to Wang Haigang's observation, Shanghai has the largest number of musical theater audiences in the country, and he believes that in 2021, the richness of the performance category in the Shanghai performing arts market may surpass Beijing. Wang Haigang analyzed that there are two reasons behind it, "On the one hand, Shanghai's prevention and control level is first-class in the country, and most of the performances can be carried out normally without being affected by the epidemic; on the other hand, under the call of building an 'Asian Performing Arts Capital', Shanghai has given considerable support in theater construction and repertoire creation, and most of the talents of domestic musicals are gathered in Shanghai, and the premieres of many musicals are also scheduled in Shanghai."
Musicals, the next reason to love Shanghai
In fact, in the 18 years from 2002 to 2020, China has always been the mainstream of foreign imported musicals, especially in Shanghai, where audiences have a special recognition of overseas classic musical repertoire, and whenever tickets are issued, they are often sold out quickly.
After the epidemic, overseas teams could not come in, and audiences spent money on more local original projects, which accelerated the development of domestic original musicals. However, behind the lively market, An Dong believes that there is still a certain disconnect between the creation of original musicals, the professionalism of musical theater actors and the aesthetic needs of the audience. "The popularity of the variety show "Sound into People's Hearts" has greatly accelerated the development of the domestic musical theater market, because of the personal charm of the actors, a group of new audiences from Aiwu and Wu have been attracted to the theater, and some of them have recognized this art form in the process of watching the drama, and then transformed into musical theater fans. However, it is undeniable that the fan aggregation effect of the current musical theater market is still obvious, in other words, it is not because of how good the show itself is to buy tickets, but to buy tickets for the sake of chasing stars. ”
"In the past year or so, there have been many excellent works in the mushrooming new dramas, such as "Fu Delhi", "Loyalty", "Orphan of Zhao", etc., but there are also some shoddy and hasty 'cutting leek' musicals, and in general, the current domestic original musicals still have not appeared at the peak." Chen Dong told Xinmin Weekly, "Catering to the audience's aesthetics or leading the audience's aesthetics is a problem that creators should think about carefully, a drama is made, to be able to let the audience go out of the theater and still have a little chewing, to withstand the test of the market, but also to withstand the test of the times." As a veteran theater fan, Chen Dong expects that in the future, musical theater can become a reason for more people to like Shanghai.
In fact, in terms of using musicals to tell oriental stories well, Shanghai's musical theater people have made useful explorations and attempts.
The development of the musical theater market is inseparable from talents, but the rapid changes in the industry have put forward higher requirements for teaching units. An Dong told reporters that in recent years, the department has made a relatively large action in the social practice course, "For musical theater actors, the interview is the first level for them to go to the market, so we invite foreign experts or domestic musical theater production companies to give our students a workshop to simulate a practical interview." At the same time, we ask experts to point out the problems of students during interviews in a targeted manner and tell him how to improve, so as to achieve the effect of practical combat and make students gain something. Of course, if the student's performance is very good, it is also possible to be directly selected by the crew to play the role."
In the 20 years since the establishment of the Department of Shangyin Musical Theatre, successive department heads have been composers of musical theatre, so in terms of original musicals, regardless of quantity or quality, Shangyin is among the best in the country. "In the five years from 2016 to 2021 alone, three musicals ("Sea Sound", "Love Wenji", and "Spring Shanghai 1949") have been selected for the National Arts Fund's large-scale stage drama funding project, which is unique among colleges and universities in The country. In 2020, the centenary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, Shangyin created an original musical "Loyalty" and received strong support from the Fengxian District Government and the Shanghai Archives. An Dong introduced.
In recent years, on the basis of the original great emphasis on composition, Shangyin's original musicals have paid more and more attention to interdisciplinary cooperation with screenwriters and directors, and actively introduced and cultivated their own talents, which shows that Shangyin has made major adjustments in the idea of producing original musicals. An Dong explained: "Music is of course important for musicals, when we think of those classic works, the first thing that rings in our minds is often the soul tracks in the play, such as the Memory of "Cats", but it is undeniable that the script, performance, dance, etc. of the musical are equally important, and we also hope to expand the professional knowledge structure of students from the theater aspect." ”
More and more attention is paid to the importance of scripts to musicals, which is also a major trend in the production of musicals by private theater companies. Wang Haigang said that the production mechanism of domestic original musicals is still in a relatively primary stage. "At present, there is no relatively mature way of creating musicals in the market, and many musicals can only be called musical dramas at best. Of course, blockbuster works need to be invested, it takes a long time to polish, we look forward to the continuous development of the industry, more and more talents into the musical theater industry. Wang Haigang said.
In addition, there is a growing emphasis in the country on the importance of producers to a musical.
On Broadway, producers discover and create a wide variety of musical theater productions, and he is not only responsible for raising funds for the launch and production of musicals, but also responsible for the promotion, sales and ongoing operation of the repertoire performances. In European and American countries, there are a large number of works widely circulated behind each top producer, and these works and producers constitute the history of the development of musical theater.
In order to systematically cultivate more outstanding musical theater producers, on October 30, 2020, the inauguration ceremony of the Producer Professional Committee of the China Musical Theatre Association was held in Shanghai. Li Dun, director of the producer professional committee and a well-known musical theater producer, said that with the help of the platform, more professional producers communicate with each other, support each other, hug each other for warmth, break the previous situation of "sweeping the snow in front of the door", and jointly use musicals to tell Chinese stories.
Theatre has also become an important force in the development of original musicals. In Zhang Xiaoding's view, the theater is a place full of vitality and creativity, "not only as a renter of the venue, but from the source, do some incubation and innovation, and strive for the initiative of the theater."
In 2021, Shanghai Grand Theatre and Damai jointly launched the Fly Project, a new commercial musical theatre works incubation and musical theatre creation talent training project, to provide Chinese musical theater creators with a platform for new work creation, learning, production and commercial development through the introduction of international mature incubation mechanisms and resources, and jointly create excellent works.
In 2022, the shanghai grand theatre is deeply involved in the production of the Chinese version of the musical "The Brothers Karamazov" for the first time, which is scheduled to meet with the audience at the China Theater in June this year, which is the first step in the production of original musicals by the Grand Theatre. "In the future, the creation of commercial drama will be an important strategic layout for the future development of the theater, revitalizing the resources accumulated by the grand theater in the past 20 years, transforming them into good works, and finally presenting them on the stage." Zhang Xiaoding said.
In their description, the reporter saw that a musical capital of China is constantly leaping forward on the banks of the Huangpu River. (Reporter Zhou Jie)