Taiwan musical theater director dreams of creating show on Broadway

Taipei, Feb. 17 (CNA) VMTheatre Company co-founder and director Tseng Hui-cheng (曾慧誠) said he is very proud of the success of his top telling musical "Don't Cry, Dancing Girls" (勸世三姊妹) after presenting it in New York in a bold venture aimed at Broadway.

The musical first premiered in Kaohsiung in January 2023 with two sold-out tours in Taiwan, with Tseng staging four shows of the original musical at the Off-Broadway venue Theatre Row in New York from Jan. 23-25.

"We have received plenty of positive feedback," Tseng said when talking about taking his work to New York during a news conference in Taipei on Monday.

"If it weren't for 'Don't Cry, Dancing Girls' being liked by so many theater goers in Taiwan, I wouldn't have dared to have this dream."

The goal of the Off-Broadway shows, Tseng said, is to attract playwrights, composers and song writers to develop a Broadway show based on the story about how three siblings reconcile with their deceased father through learning "soul guiding ritual" undertaken at funerals.

The fact that local producers and playwrights in the audience in New York were moved to tears by the soul guiding ritual scene gave him and his team great confidence to tell the story to audiences abroad, Tseng said.

The musical was performed in Mandarin and Taiwanese Hokkien, with an English-speaking narrator added to take the audience through the show, according to VMTheatre Company.

At Monday's news conference, Tseng said he and Tony Award-winning Broadway producer Ken Dingledine, who also worked behind the Off-Broadway presentation, will found a company to realize the dream of creating a production in English.

"I keep an open mind. It is important to find the people who can tell this story to the audience on Broadway well," Tseng said as he talked about looking for new partners to create an English production.

"Many (Taiwanese) in the audience hoped that we can bring the Chinese-language version there, so the second generation can learn about Taiwan's culture," Tseng said.

Tseng said he expects the process of making a new commercially viable production of "Don't Cry, Dancing Girls" to take three to eight years.

To create the musical, Tseng, playwright Zhan Jie (詹傑) and composer Kan Ho-hsiang (康和祥) visited several soul guiding ritual performers, who sing and dance to tell stories about life and values for hours before funerals.

Several script-reading sessions were held from 2021, before the 2023 premiere.

Tseng said on Monday an American playwright who was moved to tears after reading the script asked him to tell Zhan how she was touched by the Golden Bell Award-winning screenwriter's work.

Kan's music is expected to be remain largely unchanged, Tseng added.

Meanwhile, for the audience in Taiwan, VMTheatre Company has announced plans to stage a new production in May, a 10th anniversary-version of the musical "Reed Unbroken" (釧兒) in November, and the return of "Don't Cry, Dancing Girls" in mid-2026.