Taiwan Today

A visit to a theater in Taiwan can trigger a sense of deja vu and lamentation over a shrinking world. One finds strutting across the stages the sights and sounds of Broadway and London's West End--The Phantom of the Opera, Mamma Mia!, West Side Story and Rent. These big-budget foreign musicals, with their proven box office records, have been able to attract sponsorship from big corporations and a good deal of media buzz in Taiwan.

Taiwanese musical productions, on the other hand, are struggling to make ends meet. Taiwanese audiences and sponsors seem much more willing to spend big bucks on overseas troupes than giving local artists a chance to show off their creative instincts.

Yet, even though local artists are facing tremendous funding and box office challenges, two local musical theater companies, dedicated to producing Broadway favorites and original Taiwanese musicals, are eager to reinvent musical theater in Taiwan. The young and ambitious Lan Creators is aspiring to attain Broadway standards with local talent and is breathing new life into familiar Broadway numbers. In the meantime, Dafeng Musical Theater, now seven years old, prides itself on its inexhaustible originality and has recently produced a brand new musical in the local Chinese dialects of Holo and Hakka that pays homage to legendary Taiwanese composer Deng Yu-sian.

A theater major himself, Lan Creators' founder and director Lin Chia-yi became enthralled by the magic of musicals after he saw his first Broadway musical, Man of La Mancha, in New York City during his sophomore year in college. Since then, he has been taking annual trips to New York to watch more theater performances in search of inspiration for his own company. Lin's original idea was simple. He wanted to do a musical as his graduation production, and he thought his school, Taipei National University of the Arts, would be an ideal environment from which to pluck dancers, musicians, and theater majors of all stripes to produce a campus musical.

As the ball started rolling, the scale of his production just kept getting bigger. Although still a student, Lin hoped his show would rival a professional production. He bought the rights to perform the Broadway musical Into the Woods, even though he did not know then how to read the musical score. Lin asked his father for financial help. He drafted an estimated budget of roughly US$30,000, to which his father agreed. But as the production got underway, the budget quickly grew threefold. "My dad was furious," Lin said wryly. Thankfully, box office sales made up for the ballooning costs, and more importantly, the 12 runs of Into the Woods launched Lan Creators' career in 2005 and placed it on the map of Taiwan's musical theater scene.

A Penchant for Perfection

Lin's vision for Lan Creators is to rid Taiwanese productions of Broadway shows of their amateurishness. "I think the problem of the musical theater industry in Taiwan has to do with the production mechanism," Lin said. "There doesn't seem to be enough coordination of the three essential elements: song, dance and acting. There also aren't enough performers that are good in all three respects. "

Lin would like to emulate the model used in Broadway productions that trains troupe members to become versatile performers. He thinks of Broadway as a standard rather than just the name of a place or a genre, and he has insisted on building his team the Broadway way. He held auditions to recruit all the actors and actresses at Lan Creators. Those who made the final cut then received intensive training in tap and jazz dancing, acting, voice and other disciplines. Before any of their big shows, the actors can easily spend over 40 hours a week rehearsing in the studio. Lin is always observing closely to check up on each of the performers. "Lan is a very tight group, and our artists grow together," Lin added.

Lin said people often asked him why he has chosen to do Broadway musicals in English rather than translating them into Chinese or creating original Chinese musicals. "Lan Creators has chosen to do Broadway musicals and sing in English because I think local Taiwanese musicals haven't fully matured yet," Lin explained. "By learning from a mature art form, we will gradually be able to create an art form that belongs to us."

Indeed, Broadway musicals are most famous for the commercial expertise of their productions. Creativity is necessary, of course, but what makes Broadway is the professionalism of a commercial production. In trying to recreate that professionalism, Lan Creators tries to avoid skimping on expenses that will affect the performance. For example, in Lan Creators' latest production, Let's Broadway (a collection of songs from some of the best-received Broadway musicals), the company built a wall of light bulbs to recreate the spectacular ambience of New York's 42nd Street. On top of the creative and audacious set design, the elaborate costumes and immaculate choreography give an indication that Lin is serious about recreating a little bit of Broadway in the Far East.

Lin said he is always trying to create effects that "wow" the audience. He once spent NT$100,000 (US$3,000) just to create a crack on the stage. "Musical theater is, after all, a show. We want to try to make our performances as attractive and entertaining to the audience as possible," Lin explained.

In order to allow Lan Creators' artists to support themselves entirely by performing, Lin has positioned the group not only as a musical troupe but also as an agency that cultivates talented actors. Lan Creators' producer and veteran performer Chen Wu-ming said he thinks Lan's commercial advantage over other Taiwanese musical theater companies is that the group's artists stay with the group and grow into different roles.

Moreover, since Lan Creators specializes in musicals which can be easily broken into sections to be performed separately, this allows the group to perform not only in concert halls but also at corporate parties or even on the street. These various venues allow the actors to grow more comfortable with interacting with audiences and also help boost the group's publicity.

Above all, Lin and Chen believe that success can only come from pooling the resources and talent found in Taiwan. "There are many passionate people out there trying to make great things happen," said Lin. "But if they work alone, what they can achieve is quite limited."

Lan Creators' ambitious and exciting productions have kept its fans wondering what the next step might be. Lan's next major production will be the sexy and hilarious off-Broadway relationship comedy I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change. One of the longest running off-Broadway musicals, the show captures the various scenarios in love and relationships with a poignant sense of humor. Also noteworthy in this comedy production is that a small cast of six will be playing more than 50 roles.

The show opens on November 3 at Crown Theater and will continue to run until November 30, making it one of the longest running musicals in Taiwan, where shows tend to appear only briefly. This is a new experiment for Lan Creators and also a litmus test for a Taiwanese audience's reaction toward this Sex and the City-esque comedy. The venue is small, seating only 150 people, but the sense of intimacy suits the off-Broadway nature of the show perfectly.

Toward a Local Tradition

When Lin spoke of hoping to see a uniquely Taiwanese musical theater tradition emerge, he could well have been talking about Dafeng Musical Theater. While Lin is attempting to master the professionalism of a Broadway show, Dafeng is creating musicals from very local traditions. The theater group composes original music to accompany familiar stories and historic tales. An industrial engineering major, Lian Yi-chou founded Dafeng in 2000. So far, the group has produced nine musicals, with themes ranging from Western fairytales and Chinese folklore to historical narratives.

Dafeng got its start producing musicals for children, such as Chinese-language versions of Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker and Sinbad. "I thought children's musicals would be a good place to start because parents normally would go to the shows with their kids, which helps with the box office sales," Lian said.

Although Dafeng's first productions were meant for children, their quality was by no means compromised. An insistence on achieving high-quality theater helped the group to accumulate a growing audience of all ages throughout their first few musicals. After Dafeng became more established, it also began to produce musicals for adults. In each of their productions, they seek to present to the audience brand new audio and visual sensations. They transformed a classic Chinese love story, The Butterfly Lovers, into a modern love triangle coupled with innovative musical experiments. The group also revised a well-received social satire called Ho-Chu's New Match from the 1970s and gave a brand new look to the three-decade old play. Last year, Dafeng presented on stage the story of a somewhat controversial and yet unquestionably influential lady, Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

Dafeng's latest venture is April Rain, a musical featuring legendary early 20th-century songwriter Deng Yu-sian. April Rain recalls a golden age for the arts in Taiwan, when the island was bursting with unprecedented creativity and liveliness. Deng was one of the premier songwriters of that era. During his short four-decade life, he composed over 50 songs, many of which have been covered by later singers and are still well-loved by Taiwanese today. Listening to Deng's songs never fails to conjure up nostalgic feelings about those familiar and yet distant days.

April Rain marks the first musical composed in Holo, also known as Taiwanese, and Hakka--two Chinese dialects spoken by over 70 percent of the population. Dafeng is promoting the show as the first Broadway-quality musical that truly captures Taiwan's spirit. Lian came up with the idea to do a musical about Deng when a friend of his encouraged him to submit a proposal for a subsidy from the Council for Hakka Affairs, a government office that promotes the learning of the Hakka dialect, among other things. "We didn't end up getting the subsidy, but I became fascinated by the topic. I began to do more research into Mr. Deng's life and started looking for potential sponsors," Lian explained.

The sponsor that helped bring April Rain pattering onto the stage was the Yong Lin Foundation. The foundation is not among the most famous but it was funded by Terry Gou, chairman of Foxconn Technology Group, Taiwan's largest electronic parts manufacturer. Besides providing financial help to Dafeng, the Yong Lin Foundation's sponsorship for Dafeng has also brought unprecedented media exposure to April Rain. Journalists swarmed promotional events, and Lian and composer Ran Tian-hao were both invited to discuss their new work on prime-time television. Ran is not only the composer of April Rain, but also the composer of most Dafeng musicals. "He is really talented and can always create the exact kind of music to go with the stories," said Lian. "That's why we have been working together since Dafeng was founded."

The lyrics of April Rain proved to be a particularly challenging task because they needed to be written in Holo and Hakka rather than in the more commonly used Mandarin. Generally these dialects are not written down. This called for a particularly innovative team made up of two talented lyricists, Wang Yu-hui and Chung Yong-feng, April Rain's scriptwriter Melancholy Yang, as well as the musical's director Yang Shih-ping.

"Our goal has always been to show Taiwan's audiences that locally made musicals can be just as worthwhile as foreign ones," Lian said. With a high-profile sponsor providing full support for the production of April Rain, Dafeng seems to have gotten another step closer to its dream, even as Lan Creators endeavors to smooth out any bumps in its recreation of Broadway in the East.

Copyright (c) 2007 by Shih Ying-ying