The first Chinese Musical Awards ceremony was held at Shangyin Opera House last night and was broadcast online. About 19 musical crews and 100 actors attended this event and the reading capacity on Weibo reached over 1 billion times. Due to the global pandemic, foreign musicals which used to dominate the domestic musical market are no longer available,while composers are seizing the opportunity to improve the quality of Chinese musicals. Recently, a number of high-quality domestic musicals produced in Shanghai have gained increasing popularity among the public through musical awards, outdoor performances and online concerts.

Due to the lack of enough talent for musicals in one particular region, Chinese musical producers used to rely on foreign musical crews to offer guidance and training. However, the pandemichas blocked this process.“Nowadays Chinese musical producers are under a lot of stress, but we will stick to our initial goal, which is to promote the development of the Chinese musical industry through further cooperation”, said Yu Xinyue, president of ACO Musical.

The performance last night showed the latest results of Chinese musicals made in Shanghai.“We need to produce more musicals like these and keep the leading role of Shanghai in the domestic musical market”, said An Dong, art director of the first Chinese Musical Awards. It has also been implied that this event aims to become an iconic event of the Chinese musical industry with annual award ceremony like those international drama festivals such as the Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theatre and the Korean Musical Awards. It will apply video technology as well in the future to make an exploration towards a new business model for musicals that are available both online and offline.

Currently the production, restoration and transportation of stage design of domestic musicals are far from satisfactorycompared with those of foreign musicals. Many other districts in China are hoping to introduce the Shanghai musicals to their residents whereas the limited audience there means that it is almost impossible for an independent show to make profits. Performing musicals on the road in different cities also poses enormous practical problems.

Luckily some measures have already been taken to eliminate these obstacles. Chinese Musical Industrial Base has previously signed a contract with 11 musical production companies that aims to introduce stage design workshops to improvethe industrial chain of domestic musicals. In the future, more musical training bases willbe established while more high-end musical forums willbe held. This could help break the technology bottleneck, providing more circulating capital for companies to expand their market in the Chinese musical industry.