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| Source: www.jrj.com.cn 2007-4-14 |
Authentic Broadway Musicals to Enter China in Droves after September
By staff reporter Zhang Lu
Broadway musical 42nd Street, a Tony Award winner premiered in 1980, tells a story about a young actress Peggy Sawyer. In pursuit of her American dream, she grew from a chorus girl into a Broadway star. Tony Award, the highest honor granted to American stage shows, is granted only to Broadway performance troupes. 42nd Street is one of the Broadway shows with the grandest scenes. When it was first staged in Broadway in 1980, 50-plus actors and thousands of costumes reproduced the Broadway splendor in the 1920s.
From New York to Toronto and from London to Sydney, 42nd Street has been staged 3,486 times around the globe. In September 2007, this musical will be introduced to China, which will herald the beginning of the operation of the newly-established Broadway China Network. The network was formally established at the Ministry of Culture on March 21, 2007. Speaking at the press conference on the same day, the representative of the network said, ¡°The 42nd Street troupe soon to come to Beijing will have the same cast as it has in New York City.¡± On the other hand, many Broadway musicals that had previously come to China for trial runs could not claim the same performing effect due to set, audio effect and other technical reasons.
The establishment of the Broadway China Network had become possible thanks to the revised Regulations on the Administration of Commercial Performing Arts promulgated by the State Council in September 2005. For the first time in history, this document allowed Chinese and foreigners to establish joint ventures for performance brokerage and theater management. It was because of this document that the Oriental Broadway International Theater Management Company was established to manage the Broadway China Network. This joint venture is co-funded by the Time New Century Media Co. in Beijing and the well-known Nederlander Worldwide Entertainment in Broadway. The latter is one of the biggest three performance brokerages in Broadway, owning nine theaters in Broadway and managing thousands of theaters around the world. In addition to 42nd Street, Nederlander has also invested in, produced, promoted and managed many famous art shows, including West Side Story, Beauty and the Beast, The King and I, Chicago and Lion King.
Six-Year-Long Exploration
Both Chen Jixin, chairman of New Century Media, and Robert Nederlander Jr, chairman of Nederlander Worldwide Entertainment, have waited six full years for this cooperation. In 2001 when Chen Jixin was still working at a large state-owned performance brokerage, she successfully imported a concert featuring the world¡¯s top three tenors as a performance broker. The short-term nature of profitability associated with a single performance inspired her to try to find a new way out: cooperate with large foreign companies and manage theater chains by taking advantage of their capital strength and management expertise.
It was then she met Robert Nederlander Jr. who came to China for market research. Likewise, he began in 2001 to look for chances to introduce Broadway musicals to China. Accompanied by Chen Jixin, he contacted the theaters in some large and medium-sized cities in the ensuing years. He finally came to a conclusion that China had a stable musical audience. But it was not until March 2006 after the Regulations on the Administration of Commercial Performing Arts that Chen Jixin and Robert Nederlander Jr. created the Oriental Broadway Company. They jointly established the Broadway China Network on March 21 this year.
¡°Simply put, the Broadway China Network is designed to select the existing fairly good theaters in Beijing, Shanghai and other major Chinese cities for a series of training on management, service and ticketing, for theater transformation and for presenting the programs brought by Broadway performers,¡± said Chen Jixin, when she described the network in her vision. ¡°But this network is not a simple alliance. The Oriental Broadway conducts performance planning, arrangement and marketing for the theaters as a whole, enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of theater use and cultivates a mature audience.¡±
This is not Broadway¡¯s first entry into China. Back in 2004, the Broadway Asia introduced Sound of Music to China. That was the first presentation of a Broadway musical in China. After that, other Broadway classics such as Cats, Rent, Phantom of the Opera, and West Wide Story had trial runs in China.
Although the performance effect of many Broadway musicals in China is somewhat discounted due to set, audio effect and other technical reasons, exceptions do exist. One exception was the presentation of Broadway musical West Side Story in Beizhan Theater in May 2006. Gao Qi, general manager of the China Performance and Entertainment Company, is still surprised at the strictness of the American Broadway Performance Troupe that staged the show. ¡°First the set must be assembled as scheduled and all the work to set the audio equipment was done by the Americans themselves. The Chinese staff had no share in it. If stage setting failed to reach Broadway¡¯s technical requirements, no performance would be staged. There were six containers of lighting and setting equipment and all the setting and audio systems were brought in by the Americans. Nothing was locally found, because substitutions might affect the quality of performance.¡±
Broadway¡¯s China Obsession
¡°Strictly speaking, theater network does not exist in Broadway of New York City. The Nederlander Company has several theaters and each theater presents a different musical all the year round.¡± Chen Jixin believes that because China now does not have conditions for continuous year-long performances, scale efficiency can only be achieved by presenting Broadway musicals to many cities after they enter China. But the newly-established Broadway China Network is apparently unable to compare with the market efficiency of the cinema networks. ¡°The theaters are all in a period of ownership transformation and they are very weak in risk resistance.¡±
Chi Tao, general manager of the People¡¯s Hall in Qingdao, has a personal experience in this respect. From 2005 on, a deputy general manager from the Nederlander Company visited the People¡¯s Hall in Qingdao four times to discuss a cooperation framework. He once hoped that the theater could share the risk with its investment. But his proposal was rejected by Chi Tao. ¡°The proposal is very good in itself. But Qingdao¡¯s market climate is at least 10 years behind that in Beijing or Shanghai. Market capacity here is very small, people here are not so willing to buy tickets, and corporate sponsorship to the cultural industry here is not active.¡±
Before 42nd Street enters China, the Oriental Broadway Company signed an agreement on strategic investment and cooperation with the world-famous ticketing company Ticketmaster. The ticketing company not only injected a substantial amount of capital in the Broadway China Network, but also would establish its own data system in China so as to form a huge ticketing network. In order to train Broadway-style performers who can both sing and dance, the Oriental Broadway Company has also entered into a strategic alliance with the Song Qingling Foundation, under which part of the box office earnings from the markets to be selected by the two sides would be donated to the foundation and the two sides would jointly organize Sino-American musical summer camps.
Chi Tao stressed that Broadway¡¯s success is based on New York¡¯s unique city status and commercial culture. Most of the musical audiences are tourists. According to the League of American Theatres and Producers, Inc., the Broadway theaters¡¯ ticket revenue alone reaches 500 million dollars a year. The total revenue totals more than USD 5 billion, audience totals more than 10 million, and visitors total 25 million people. He believes that thanks to their century-long operations, Broadway theaters, producers and brokers have formed a complete business system. In China, however, the theaters will take a long time to build a similar market framework because they now still lack management capacities.
URL: http://book.jrj.com.cn/news/20070414/000000126097.htm |
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