China to Hear Sound of Musicals at 32-theatre 'broadway' Complex

They have cheered in their droves at Les Misérables, 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 yesterday that the city's sprawling northwest suburb of Haidian - home to schools and universities, as well as the prestigious hi-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 theatre 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," said a spokesman for the developer.

In recent years, Beijing has had the opportunity to taste lavish productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as painstaking translations of Chekhov, but the new theatre 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 Misérables 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 American 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, the official journal of the Chinese Communist party, 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 People's Daily wrote.

Beijing, which is traditionally seen as China's cultural center, had a vast amount of small theaters buried in a maze of alleys and lanes. But town planners, zealously trying to turn the capital into a modern, efficient and cosmopolitan city, have consigned most of them to history. Developers of the new complex will be hoping the local appetite for foreign musicals continues to thrive.

In the two decades that followed the revolution in 1949, China's theatre groups were only permitted to stage government-approved plays written by the likes of Ibsen and Chekhov. But by 1968, thousands of local actors were exiled to the countryside by Jiang Qing, wife of the communist leader Mao Zedong, who sought to promote her own corpus of eight "socially improving" works.

Times have changed, and the propaganda dramas of the 1960s and 1970s have given way to feel-good western productions. The developers of the new theatre complex - the Beijing Shibo Group and the Oriental Broadway Company - will be hoping that the local appetite for foreign musicals continues to thrive.

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 accompany it.