Beijing - Shanghai Musical Market Cultivation Strategy Study

Musical Theatre is an exotic art form, which has developed in western for nearly 100 years. It is loved by people all over the world due to its free style and the contents that are near our lives. It owns large theatergoer groups both in western and eastern. Broadway and West End are two famous areas of Musical Theatre.With the development and the open of Chinese economy and culture, with the rising taste of Chinese people, many western producers have promising estimations on Chinese musical market. They have cooperated with many Chinese entertainment companies to introduce several western musicals into China, all of which are famous and popular in western. In 2001, Shanghai Grand Theatre started this ice-broken journey by importing the most popular mega-musical Les Misérables. The show ran 21 times on Shanghai stage, which, as a western play, made a miracle in Chinese entertainment market. Nowadays, Chinese entertainment companies import at least one show per year on the average. Over 12 musicals have been brought to China mainland since 2001.With practices for years, Shanghai and Beijing got their own markets and achievements. While the differences are still obviously: In Shanghai, the running period is longer with reasonable for tickets, but Beijing is in the opposite way. The differences between the two cities indicated from the audience's reflection and markets'operating level.Combined with cases analyzing, this thesis craved up the customers and compared the market breeding strategy. I also tried to find out the reasons of high-ticket price and the cost.There are at least 14 books about Musical Theatre written by authors in China, 10 of which are about the reality of Musical Theatre. Most authors are the scholars or senior experts in this field, and the researches and information are deeply enough, 4 of which are about the marketing of performing arts / musical theatre. They are: Strategies for marketing the performing arts, New Eyes Shot: The research report on the running of western entertainment business, The newly appeared art and industry: The fate of Musical Theatre in China, Music Marketing and Cases Analysis, Musicals @Shanghai. These books and articles gave us a lot of new points of marketing, popularizing, and they shown many fresh ideas to us to run musical projects.This thesis would like to analyze some important marketing cases of Musical Theatre in Beijing and Shanghai from 2001 to 2007. And then, the thesis will find out the reasons of success or failure for popularizing these musicals. The degree of localizing the western musicals is also needed to know. Finally, the thesis will find out the best mode of Musical Theatre for Chinese market.