Hong Kong’s homegrown Cantonese musicals are on a roll. More new works are being staged, seeing longer runs and bigger box-office returns. Leon Lee goes behind the scenes to find out what goes into delivering a hit musical.
Hong Kong is seeing a Cantonese-musicals boom, and a number of these shows are homegrown productions — conceptualized, written, set to music, developed and staged by artists and technicians of the city. Both reputed professional theater companies such as Chung Ying Theatre Co and the Hong Kong Repertory Theatre (HK Rep), as well as an increasing number of independent, small-scale ones like Musical Trio Ltd, Theatre Space and Boom Theatre are part of this growth story.
Many recently produced Hong Kong musicals are coming-of-age stories, attracting a young audience. Examples include A Tale of the Young Shennong, a rock musical, produced in 2024 by Musical Trio; Sing Out — A Musical, with different editions in 2024 and again this year and produced by the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA) EXCEL — a training program for teenagers leading to staging of original musicals — and the Hong Kong Arts Festival produced I Am What I Am (2024), adapted from a hugely popular Chinese animation film that follows a group of “left behind” teenagers from rural China on their aspirational journeys.
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The last edition of the annual Hong Kong Drama Awards, held in April, saw the introduction of five new awards in the musical category, a move that bodes well for the future of the performance form in the city.
Winner all the way
The Impossible Trial, the first original Cantonese musical commissioned by WestK, has proved to be a runaway hit. Co-produced by HK Rep, it won 10 major awards out of a record-high 15 nominations earned at the 2023 Hong Kong Drama Awards. Staged at the Xiqu Centre in 2022 and 2023, the musical is back in the city, after a sold-out tour of Shanghai and Beijing.
Set in Guangdong province during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), The Impossible Trial follows the journey of Fong Tong-geng, a high-profile, unscrupulous lawyer who eventually goes on to expose the deep-seated corruption in the system. The musical was created by composer Leon Ko and lyricist Chris Shum. The duo’s first collaboration, in 2003, was a musical adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s play The Good Person of Szechwan, co-produced by HK Rep and Actors’ Family. They went on to write a number of acclaimed works, including 2009’s The Passage Beyond, 2017’s Sing Out — A Musical, and 2024’s I Am What I Am.
Shum — who has been writing for musicals, films, television and pop music for more than three decades — says that developing The Impossible Trial was unlike his experience with any other musical. Whereas on earlier occasions the tasks of “developing the story, composing the music and lyrics, rehearsing with performers, and staging the show” had to be accomplished “within the span of six to nine months”, The Impossible Trial was in development for nearly seven years.
Ko and Shum were given a free hand with choosing their material and working at their own pace. A number of previews were staged for an invited audience in 2019. The feedback led to certain key changes in the songs as well as in terms of character arcs. By the time the musical was ready for its premiere in 2022, it had been fine-tuned into a compelling piece of work.
WestK had ensured that the rehearsals were held in a space and with props that were as good as the facilities at the Xiqu Centre. This is a rare privilege for any theater company in space-constrained Hong Kong.
Lau Shau-ching, who plays the central character of Fong, says, “There are two pieces of massive revolving architecture in the show. During rehearsals, we were fortunate to have a space with replicas of these, giving cast members plenty of scope to get used to them. We were able to figure out our timing, positions and coordinate movements with one another, well before we began performing to a live audience.”
He believes The Impossible Trial serves as a model of how the right combination of factors can lead to both commercial success and critical acclaim for Hong Kong’s homegrown musicals.
Allure of song and dance
Mandy Yiu, artistic producer of Actors’ Family, believes that the popularity of a musical is often owed to its form. “When you take the same story and tell it through a play and a musical, you will find more people are interested in the musical because there are many different types of performances — singing, acting, and dancing — in it,” she says.
Formed in 1991, the company began by producing both Cantonese plays and musicals, but since 2000 it has focused exclusively on the latter. It has produced over 50 original Cantonese musicals, including 1993’s 1941 Girl! and 2017’s The Lily of the Valley.
Despite the growing popularity of musicals, there are also a number of challenges to contend with, not the least of these is raising the funds to cover production costs.
In April, Actors’ Family performed six shows of their latest musical, Pan Yu Lin, at the Tsuen Wan Town Hall. Over two years in development, the show tells the story of Pan Yuliang (1895-1977), the first female Chinese artist to paint in the Western style. Pan had trained in France and celebrated women in many of her paintings.
To cut down on production costs, the show was presented in the form of a workshop, rather than a finished stage production. Light, sound, costume and props were kept to a minimum. All six shows sold out.
Chicken soup for the soul
Seeing that any Hong Kong-made stage production running to 20 or more shows is considered a success, an original homegrown musical approaching the 700 mark ought to be something of a phenomenon.
Tom Chan, the founder and creative director of Boom Theatre, says he never expected his Our Journal of Springtime to become Hong Kong’s first long-running musical. All he wanted was to put out the message that it was possible to overcome “some of life’s biggest obstacles by having a different perspective” on them through the medium of a new musical.
Premiering in 2019, Our Journal of Springtime has been playing at Boom Theatre’s Kwai Wing Road venue since September 2022, with six shows a week. The musical traces the journey of a group of Hong Kong students trying to reconcile their personal aspirations with parental and societal expectations.
Chan says he believes that the musical’s sustained run is owed to its relatable themes of experiencing dreams, regrets and generation gap. The last of these is also reflected in the way audience members — depending on the stage of life they are in — respond differently to certain scenes. Chan adds that there are instances of people watching the show more than 100 times. “They tell me that this is because the musical serves as something of a comforting bowl of chicken soup for the soul to them. Whenever they’re feeling unhappy, they come watch the show in order to recharge.”
At present, Chan is working on Love for Granted — The Musical, an adaptation of Lawrence Cheng’s popular ’80s radio drama series that follows the ups and downs of the main character’s marriage and relationships.
He says he wanted to set himself the challenging task of reinterpreting a popular program and adapting it into a different form. “The advantage in this is that existing works already have their own fan base, hence it’s safe to assume that there will be some interest from the audience when the show premiers this month.”
Boom Theatre also puts on limited-run productions featuring artists with star value in order to attract first-time spectators of musicals. The company’s most recent show, The 18. 28 & 38, was staged at the Xiqu Centre in June and starred well-known actor Raymond Wong Ho-yin, Cantopop singer and actor Shiga Lin Sze-nga, besides singers Winka Chan, from the girl group Collar, and Tiger Yau, from the boy band Mirror.
The road ahead
As newer, and more diverse, works are written and staged, musical producers have one more reason to feel optimistic. Soon Hong Kong will see the opening of more venues to support staging of musicals. These include facilities at the East Kowloon Cultural Centre and the WestK Performing Arts Centre — a 1,450-seat Grand Theatre, for example.
Next year will also see HKAPA’s dedicated musical theater program producing its first cohort of graduates, adding to the city’s talent pool of artists with specialized skills. Actors’ Family recently partnered with WestK to launch a yearlong Musical Next Creatives Incubation Scheme, which is expected to nurture aspiring local playwrights, composers and lyricists by offering classes and workshops led by professional mentors. In June, the program’s first batch of 11 participants presented 30-minute extracts from their works in progress at the Xiqu Centre.
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Yiu is confident that “Hong Kong has no shortage of talent” when it comes to writing and staging of new musicals. She believes the onus lies on the professionals in the field to guide artists with potential in the right direction.
“As creators and curators, we need to do a good job of supporting the development of original musicals as best as we can, by creating more opportunities for the new generation of artists and guiding each step of their development. Then we might see even more people getting involved and helping to produce more high-quality musicals in Hong Kong.”
If you go
The Impossible Trial
Dates: Through Wednesday
Venue: Grand Theatre, Xiqu Centre, 88 Austin Road West, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon
www.westk.hk
