A scene from Ghost, an English musical on tour in China this year.

Fast growth

The whole Asian market for musical theater has developed rapidly in the past decades. In China, the rapid development of the market has allured heavy investment in the live theater industry, especially musical theater.

There have been dozens of original Chinese musicals, and more are on the way, each with a production cost of tens of millions yuan. Tiny Times, a novel by young celebrity author Guo Jingming, has been made into an extremely profitable film franchise, and lately a musical production has been made. With its first round of shows staged in May, the musical is under revision, and hopefully will tour to wider parts of China later this year.

An original production Yip Man, which combines musical theater with Chinese kungfu, is being made in Shanghai, and will have its premiere in Singapore next year. According to the producer Wang Hongming, the play is aimed for the international market.

David Zhou is the producer who has introduced Ghost to China. He believes the story has universal appeal, especially the power of love that breaks the boundary between life and death. "In traditional Chinese literature and folklore, we have lots of stories about the love between human and ghosts, I think Chinese audiences will love the story."

Zhou became interested in musical theater in the 1990s, when he worked in a company that made DVD. While the retail market was dominated by piracy at that time, Zhou and his colleagues bought copyright from international film and entertainment studios, and sold these authorized DVDs in public bookstores and alongside with the DVD players, with collaboration arranged with the hardware producers.