Curtain up for scene of enthusiasm

Once, on a Friday night, she saw a musical in Beijing, while that Saturday morning she woke up at 5 o'clock to catch an early flight to Shanghai to watch two shows — Meng Weizhi, telling the story of two Chinese ancient poets, and Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, an adaptation by French playwright Alexandre Dumas' well-known novel. That Sunday, she watched two more plays, and was about to fly home, but she got a message informing that her flight was delayed until midnight, so she immediately went to buy another ticket to watch another performance of the Le Comte de Monte-Cristo that evening, before winding up her record-breaking five-play binge.

"That was really exhausting, but it is my spiritual nourishment," she says, recalling her "five-show-in-a-row craziness".

Shanghai has become a favorite destination for many Chinese theatergoers. In 2017, the metropolis officially declared its target to become "Asia's performing arts capital". In 2019, its municipal bureau of culture and tourism proposed to set up 100 "new spaces for performances". By transforming office buildings, shopping malls and commercial zones into accommodating performance venues, the city has broadened its theater landscape, helping "small-theater "low-budget plays to have more shows performed on more stages, thus gaining widespread popularity.

In terms of the number of musical performances, for example, Shanghai takes the lead nationally. Of all the 9,960 musical theater performances nationwide in 2023,5,888 were held in Shanghai, making up around 60 percent of the total. And in the first half of 2024, its 100 "new performance spaces" hosted 9,927 performances, attracting 1.68 million audience members and generating a total revenue of 147 million yuan ($20.3 million), according to the Shanghai Performing Arts Association.

Many "theater-bingers" repeatedly watch plays they have seen before.

Zhang once flew to Shanghai to see three performances of the musical Fan Letter, just to savor the different cast. A special term has been coined for this behavior: "collecting casts".

It is even more common in small theaters, where performances are repeated every weekend with varying casts. For example, Mia Famiglia, a popular small-theater play staged since 2020 — telling stories of three men who meet in a 1930s New York bar and prepare for a final performance together — has been staged over 1,000 times in the past four years. It was scheduled to be staged for 17 performances in Shanghai this month, almost each time acted by a different cast, according to Damai, a ticketing service platform.

Wang is a loyal fan of the musical King's Table, which features a man's adventure on an island. "It is a tragedy of an idealist, but it converted into a belief for me: to do it anyway, even when it seems impossible," she remarks.