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"A New Path to the Future": Women Producers of Border-Crossing Musical Theatre in Japan, South Korea, and China

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tt.2023.a901199

1086-3346

Laura MacDonald,

Theatre and Performance Studies

"A New Path to the Future":Women Producers of Border-Crossing Musical Theatre in Japan, South Korea, and China Laura MacDonald (bio) When South Korean producer Sophy Jiwon Kim decided she had to produce the Austrian musical Mozart! (1999) in South Korea, she flew to Tokyo to pursue its creators Michael Kunze and Sylvester Levay at a Japanese theatre and persuade them to grant her the rights for a Korean premiere in 2010. When American producers failed to finance a revue show celebrating the work of Broadway director and producer Harold Prince, Japanese producer Murata Hiroko1 risked her career to honor Prince, premiering the revue, Prince of Broadway, in Japan in 2015, prior to a 2017 Broadway opening. When Chinese producer Yang Jiamin wanted to bring the American musical Man of La Mancha (1965) to China but the initial license agreement proved prohibitive for her fledgling Chinese company's 2012 inaugural production, she traveled to New York and negotiated with the show's composer, Mitch Leigh. These women have taken risks for musical theatre. They cross borders and continents, often based on strong instincts rather than certainties. Although they work in domestic musical theatre industries with different histories of development, as women producing musicals in East Asia, Murata, Kim, and Yang have had remarkably similar experiences. Their audacity and fortitude have made the production of numerous European and American musicals possible in East Asia, winning audiences and further developing methods of production in their local industries. They each identify musicals and collaborators they believe in, negotiate licensing agreements, hire script translators, production teams, and performers, and prepare productions at domestic venues. Although Murata, Kim, and Yang collaborate with men and produce musicals centering men, each remains mindful of women in their audiences and makes space for more women in musical theatre. Their responsiveness to their domestic industries and audiences, and willingness to implement a range of strategies in their producing, means the labels of "McTheatre" (Rebellato 39) and "Broadway-style" (Savran), introduced by Dan Rebellato and David Savran to discuss trends in musical theatre outside the Anglophone world, are insufficient descriptors of each woman's portfolio of productions. Women's theatrical labor has until the late twentieth century largely been omitted from Western theatre historiography (Canning). My own anthology, the Palgrave Handbook of Musical Theatre Producers (coedited with William A. Everett, 2017), includes just one woman, American producer Daryl Roth, in nearly fifty chapters exploring men's achievements in musical theatre producing in the US, Europe, and Asia. American women working in musical theatre, such as producer Cheryl Crawford (Porgy and Bess revivals in the 1940s, Brigadoon [1947], Paint Your Wagon [1951]), composer and arranger Trude Rittman (Carousel [1945], The King and I [1951], My Fair Lady [1956]), choreographer Hanya Holm (Kiss Me, Kate [1948], My Fair Lady, Camelot [1960]), director-choreographer Agnes de Mille (Oklahoma! [1943], Brigadoon, Allegro [1947], Paint Your Wagon), director Vinnette Carroll (Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope [1972], Your Arms Too Short to Box With God [1976], and writer-composer-director Elizabeth Swados (Runaways [1978], Doonesbury [1983]), have begun to receive more scholarly attention.2 Accomplished women working in musical theatre later in the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, such as director-choreographers Graciela [End Page 65] Daniele (Once on This Island [1990], Ragtime [1998], Marie Christine [1999]) and Susan Stroman (Crazy for You [1992], The Producers [2001], The Scottsboro Boys [2010]), director Diane Paulus (Hair [2009 revival], Pippin [2013 revival], Waitress [2016]), lyricist Lynn Ahrens (Once on this Island, Ragtime, Anastasia [2017]), and composer Jeanine Tesori (Caroline, or Change [2004], Fun Home [2015], Kimberly Akimbo [2022]), are only occasionally and briefly discussed. In her introduction to the special issue of Asian Theatre Journal, "Women in Asian Theatre: Conceptual, Political, and Aesthetic Paradigms," Arya Madhavan observes that "the 'absence' of women is often not the case within Asian performance traditions" (347). Madhavan surveys early Asian theatre history and finds "examples of female partnership and enterprise in the business of theatre/performance are manifold" (348). She privileges "the simultaneous presence and absence of women" in Asian theatre history as an opportunity to problematize a Western perception of women's universal absence...