In addition, Shanghai is also a gathering place for China's musical theater industry, with industry operators, theater producers, and actors with musical dreams gathering in Shanghai.
In Shanghai, there is a building called Asia Tower on Jiujiang Road in Shanghai's Huangpu District, which is close to the bustling Nanjing East Road, and looks up to see the iconic Oriental Pearl, which is also one of the most familiar places for Chinese musicals.
Like Broadway in New York, London's West End and Daehakro in Seoul, Asia Tower is a "vertical theater district" where musicals and immersive theatre are staged. At the 2024 Shanghai Performing Arts Development Forum, Zhang Jie, vice president of the Shanghai Grand Theatre Performing Arts Center and general manager of Shanghai Culture Square, revealed that of the 9,960 musicals performed nationwide in 2023, 5,888 will be in Shanghai.
From Asia House to the "Capital of Musicals", how did Shanghai do it?
When musicals become "Shanghai specialties"
Since its opening in 2020, "Apollonia" has been performed nearly 1,000 times, and the almost full tavern is becoming a new "Shanghai specialty".
Yuan Qi, deputy general manager of "A Good Show", the producer of "Apollonia", told the Blue Whale reporter that it is expected that the number of performances of "Apollonia" in the Shanghai Main Museum will exceed 1,000 in July and August this year. "From the end of 2022 to 2023, our audience began to have some trends to break the circle, which is based on the audience converted by the brand recognition accumulated by the show over the past few years. Another part of the reason is that the entire theater industry has been very vigorous in recent years, and this circle has formed a virtuous circle, expanding little by little, in fact, it is a process of gradual outward expansion. ”
In addition to "Apollonia", the list of "Shanghai Specialty Musicals" is also constantly updated, only 3 months after the premiere of "Turning the King's Chess", the play received the intention of the Korean theater label Never Ending Play to buy the copyright, the original suspense musical "Butterfly Change" with two heroines will be performed in South Korea, and well-known IPs such as "The Silent Truth" and "The Hidden Corner" have also been put on the stage of musicals, achieving a double harvest at the box office and word of mouth......
When Asia Tower became a "vertical drama block", the musical itself began to have cultural tourism attributes.
Wang Zuowen, founder of the original musical production company Phantom Whale Culture, told the Blue Whale reporter: "From my point of view, I have always believed that musicals will eventually evolve into a part of the tourism industry. Chinese often say 'come and come', and it will definitely be a few more shows, just like Broadway in the United States and London's West End for tourists, they are already a complete tourism industry. ”
Asia Tower is becoming more and more like an "attraction". In addition to its own check-in attributes as a performance venue, due to the rise of immersive theater in recent years, many immersive musical theaters have been released, and the musical label has also designed and decorated the venue with ingenuity, and the scene is diverse and even supporting the design of "garden activities", Yuan Qi told the Blue Whale reporter: "We also try to add some theme park logic, such as trying to use the daytime when there is no performance, to arrange it into a garden party, such as "Santa Lucia" downstairs It's a casino, and then we will give 'fake chips' to our friends who come to play, and during the garden party, there will be random drops of actors to play games with everyone, so that everyone is really 'immersed' just like Disney. ”
A still from the musical "Apollonia".
The siphon effect of Shanghai musicals
Not only Asia Tower, but more and more musical theater talents are meeting in Shanghai. In the eyes of Zhang Zhilin, the founder of Miao Shike Musical, Shanghai has a good soil for musicals, "There are dozens of outstanding young production companies, many professional actors, professional creators, and ticket-buying audiences for musicals, and all the elements are combined to form a musical market." The "siphon effect" is beginning to appear, and various innovations are also emerging.
After the popularity of "Apollonia", the model of the resident musical took hold, and the musical began to become a platform, providing actors with more stable performance opportunities and a bigger stage. Yuan Qi said: "Because of the high quality of this drama, it has a strong vitality, so it realizes the state of 'drama to support people', rather than people to support the play." It has indeed become a good star-making platform, and many actors who have walked out from our small stage may now be very appealing musical stars in this industry, and the change of this actor has actually led to the change of our audience structure to a certain extent. ”
Zhang Zhilin has been in business for nine years and has accompanied the development of the commercialization of Chinese musicals, "From entrepreneurship to now, it is obvious that Chinese musicals have become an industry from scattered to scattered. ”
In addition, as a content product with strong ToC attributes, musical theater labels are also constantly integrating innovative thinking such as the Internet. Zhang Zhilin will take into account the long-term operation of the entire repertoire when developing the repertoire, so at present, most of the repertoire development of Miao Shike is the supporting incubation of "big theater + small theater", "We want to make some differentiation and some of our own characteristics, for example, we have a big "Flame" and a corresponding small "Flame", and the product line is opened. This is a good thing for the actors and the repertoire itself, and maybe the actors in the small theater can advance to the big stage after enough experience. The big theater is usually a long-term performance, and the small theater is a resident mode, and their cooperation with each other will also be of great benefit to the maintenance of the popularity of the IP itself. ”
Yuan Qi, deputy general manager of "A Good Show", believes that good content products start at the same time as content and operation, "In the past, many practitioners may not have this awareness, because in the past, China's theater industry had a heavy tendency to be dominated by artists and belonged to the director-centered system, but at present, Shanghai should already be a producer-centered system, and the producer is the person with the highest right to speak, which is also a very important factor for Shanghai musicals to flourish." Because this is really in line with the underlying logic of this industry. ”
Yuan Qi believes that Shanghai's musical atmosphere has given more room for innovative content, "The output of new content is obviously much faster than in the past few years, and many new incubated content from small theaters to large theaters are also running well in the market." ”
Musical Theatre Innovation: Balancing Traditional Culture with World Expression
Although musicals are foreign, in just a few years, China's original musicals have developed rapidly and have successfully "gone overseas".
In 2023, the original musical "Flipping the King's Chess" was favored by the Korean musical production company Never Ending Play, and was promoted to the Korean musical market in the form of copyright export, becoming the first original musical in China to export the copyright overseas.
It's just that unlike previous works based on traditional Chinese culture, "Flipping the King's Chess" shows the struggle and loneliness in the context of Nordic civilization in the 19th century, which is a relatively unfamiliar history and environment for Asian audiences.
In this regard, Wang Zuowen, the founder of Phantom Whale Culture, the producer of the play, believes that "Chinese expression" is not limited to retelling traditional stories, but can also be "world stories and Chinese expressions". "The reason why the Korean team will take a fancy to "Flip the King's Chess" is to some extent due to the commonality of East Asian culture, although this is a story that is a little far away from us, but after the re-expression, it is actually the humanistic spirit that the entire East Asian culture is more recognized, and the expression of our East Asian emotions is more tactful and more restrained, and our story may also be more in line with the emotional resonance of the Asian region. ”
After successfully telling the "story of the world", Wang Zuowen also wants to try a new expression of "traditional Chinese culture": "This year we will also have some new works, one is a musical adapted from the novel "Sunspots", and this IP has also been adapted into the movie "Scorching Sun". In addition, we also want to retell the character of Cao Cao in the Three Kingdoms in a new form. ”
After "Apollonia", "A Good Show" once again innovated the combination of musicals and traditional culture, re-presented the essence of traditional culture with a form of expression close to modern musicals, and recreated the hit "New Dragon Gate Inn", and the traditional opera broke the circle again.
Yuan Qi told the Blue Whale reporter: "After the "New Dragon Gate Inn" became popular, we basically received almost all imaginable different drama types in the country, including some non-opera traditional performing arts category cooperation invitation. We hope to make it a content that not only meets the aesthetics and needs of today's young entertainment consumers, but also can be commercialized for a long time, which is a good thing from any point of view. ”