Making a song and dance of it

From Wednesday to Sunday, the concert version of the German musical Rebecca was staged at the Tianqiao performing arts center with seven performances, after 16 performances in Shanghai earlier this month.

Based on the 1938 novel of the same name by English novelist and playwright Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca is a Gothic romance filled with suspense, intrigue and psychological drama. The musical adaptation by German librettist Michael Kunze and Sylvester Levay, a Serbian-born Hungarian recording artist and composer, premiered in Vienna, Austria, in 2006.

According to Franz Patay, the Austrian general manager of Vereinigte Buhnen Wien, the Viennese production company behind Rebecca, the musical has been performed in 13 countries, including Germany, the Netherlands and Japan, and translated into 10 different languages. It enjoyed a fair amount of success in Europe but had a mixed reception in some places.

The latest concert version of Rebecca, based on songs from the musical, brought 30 performers, including Antonia Kalinowski and Arvid Assarsson, who sing and act, to China. This August and September, the company's other hit musical production Elisabeth, which debuted in China in 2014, returned to the mainland with shows in Shanghai, Patay adds.

"I watched Rebecca in South Korea in 2014 and dreamed about introducing it to the Chinese audience," Yang Shucong, deputy general manager of the Tianqiao performing arts center, said during the forum on Wednesday. "A year after I watched it, the Tianqiao performing arts center, one of the first venues to focus on musicals in China, opened in Beijing in 2015 with The Phantom of the Opera. Before that, the show had never been performed in Beijing."