U.K. Culture Secretary Reveals Ambition for West End to Beat Broadway

U.Okay. tradition secretary Lucy Frazer has revealed ambitions to shift the steadiness of energy within the theater world from Broadway in New York to London’s West Finish. 

Delivering the keynote deal with on the Society of London Theatre summit in London on Monday, Frazer acknowledged her plans to work intently with U.Okay. theater practitioners to “make the West Finish a magnet for the very best productions, the very best administrators and the very best playwrights within the enterprise.”

The plans for rising the U.Okay.’s theater sector are a part of the federal government’s $63 billion imaginative and prescient for the inventive industries. “We would like the Inventive Industries Imaginative and prescient to be one thing that paves the best way for a shift within the steadiness of energy from Broadway to the West Finish,” Frazer stated.

“In Andrew Lloyd Webber’s essay in The New York Occasions, marking the closing of ‘Phantom of the Opera,’ he highlighted the punishing economics that made it more durable to placed on exhibits on Broadway,” Frazer added. “And that’s not to say the state of affairs is ideal within the West Finish. However the mixture of theater you discover in London appears stronger than ever in the meanwhile.”

Frazer additionally highlighted the tax reliefs obtainable for theater and plans for creating future expertise by creating and supporting alternatives for younger folks to discover their creativity, thereby enabling them to turn into the West Finish stars of the long run.

The tradition secretary additionally highlighted the triumphs of the U.Okay. manufacturing of “A Streetcar Named Want,” hip-hop suffragette musical “Sylvia” and one-woman present “Prima Facie,” which was transported from the West Finish to Broadway and received Jodie Comer a Tony award, as “proof – if ever there was any wanted – that British theater is as we speak in a far livelier situation than appeared potential three years in the past after the primary COVID lockdown started simply after Easter.”