Musicals Scale High Note in Germany

A new leisure-time pursuit is sweeping Germany--musical tourism.

“I liked ‘Cats.’ My wife really liked ‘Starlight Express,’ ” said Aachim Ebersbach, a retired construction engineer.

“And now we’re here,” he said during the intermission at “Les Miserables,” which opened in a custom-built theater in this blue-collar town last winter. “So far, it’s good.”

What started 10 years ago when “Cats” opened in a previously shuttered operetta house in Hamburg is transforming the cultural landscape in a country better known for Wagner than Andrew Lloyd Webber.

While state-subsidized theaters and opera houses struggle to survive in an era of government cutbacks and dwindling audiences, glitzy new commercial palaces are selling out with permanently running, German-language productions of Broadway and West End blockbusters.

Rather than concentrating along one Great White Way, the theaters are popping up across the country, especially in the densely populated Ruhr Valley “Rust Belt,” where the decline of smokestack industries has forced cities to diversify for economic survival.

Bus companies do big business with weekend package “musical tours” to towns that otherwise wouldn’t be high on anyone’s list.

Like the Ebersbachs, many theatergoers get hooked on the experience, said Alexander Adler, a spokesman for Stella Musical Management GmbH, which has five shows running in Germany. “We have people who have seen ‘Cats’ 150 times.”

And the trend shows no signs of slowing. “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” premiered Dec. 13 in a converted old Krupp turbine factory in Essen. Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” opens in ’97 in a brand-new house in Stuttgart.

Bremen, suffering from the loss of its shipbuilding industry, is shopping for a proven hit, as is Berlin, which opens another musical theater in 1999.

“We don’t need ‘Joseph’ to survive,” said Wolfgang Koeppen, a tourism official in Essen, the Ruhr district’s largest city, where coal and steel once reigned supreme. But he concedes that the city has watched with envy the boom that musicals have brought to neighbors such as Bochum.

That city, population 400,000, put up $16 million for a theater right off the autobahn to show “Starlight Express” in 1988.

By charging rent, Bochum has recouped its costs. Hotels, stores and restaurants are doing twice as much business as before. And the show, which is still selling out nightly, employs 315 people and indirectly has created hundreds more jobs, according to city officials.

“It was a very good investment,” said Herbert Schmitz, a spokesman for Bochum’s mayor.

Not all are as successful, though. “The Who’s Tommy” closed in a Frankfurt suburb in June after playing to a half-empty house for just over a year. That show, however, was sung in English.

The Munich-based Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper wrote recently that the market for what it called “cultural fast food” may be close to the saturation point.

Detractors of the imported spectacles hope so.

Many worry that the success of the mass-market shows may encourage cash-strapped local governments to cut subsidies to Germany’s proud public theaters. Bureaucrats may figure that if the commercial houses can thrive on ticket sales, the state theaters should be able to as well.

That, critics warn, would be bad news for the future of German culture.

“When the subsidies disappear, the theaters will not produce any more world premieres, because private sponsors want to see Verdi, for example, not somebody they’ve never heard of,” said culture reporter Eleonore Buening of the Die Zeit weekly.

The commercial producers admit that they haven’t done much to develop home-grown talent, choosing instead to replicate proven hits from London and New York.

The musical theater genre was developing in prewar Berlin. Most famously, “The Threepenny Opera” premiered there in 1928. But Hitler put a stop to artistic experimentation.

“If it hadn’t been for World War II, musicals would have been a part of German culture,” said Christiane Peters, a Stella spokeswoman. “Now we have to import.”

Still, the Hamburg-based company has begun to get involved with smaller theaters, which should allow it to take a chance on shows written by Germans for Germans, she said.

In the meantime, state theaters may benefit if the foreign-born musicals get people away from their televisions and interested in live entertainment.

“Most people just don’t dare to go into a theater because they think it’s too cultural for them,” said Stella spokesman Adler. “Musicals are different. They’re for everybody.”