A scene from the musical “Annie Get Your Gun.” The Broadway show is currently featured in the Hung Dao Theater in HCMC’s District 1

Annie Get Your Gun’s success shows that Vietnamese theater has a long way to go, says a local theater director.

Annie Get Your Gun, currently playing at the Hung Dao Theater in Ho Chi Minh City’s District 1, looks and feels like a real Broadway musical, leading a ballet theater director to ask why Vietnam can’t make it this good all the time.

Nearly 200 professional and amateur stagehands and performers from the HCMC Ballet Symphony Orchestra and Opera (HBSO), the Saigon Players Club, the DanCenter and the International Choir of HCMC have gathered to stage Irving Berlin’s 1946 classic musical.

Four of Annie Get Your Gun’s five performances have sold out.

“The play fuses opera, jazz and western music, so it’s not as academic as traditional opera. It’s light entertainment like the film High School Musical,” said the show’s orchestra conductor Tran Vuong Thach, deputy director of HBSO.

Thach said that the collaboration presents a good opportunity for local artists to learn from both experience and the foreign professionals and organizers involved.

“Though HBSO has staged several world famous plays such as Chao Bella (Hi Bella) and Verdiana in coordination with the International Choir, the local theater scene has not developed at all,” Thach said.

He said that Vietnam lacked a proper venue to stage un-conventional plays, adding that his theater can only put on such plays in coordination with foreign theaters and that such performances can only run for a limited time.

“This is a tremendous waste. The plays should be enlightening experiences that help us develop new genres,” he said.

He said that while local performers aspire to be artistically creative, projects outside traditional genres rarely have the financial backing they need to be successful.

“We lament that traditional theatrical genres such as cai luong, tuong, cheo are becoming antiquated and are slowly dying amidst changes and modernization in Vietnam,” Thach said.

“Even when we do approach new things, we only stage a few quick shows before the idea is forgotten,” he added.

He said he was glad that cai luong (southern folk opera) had gained slightly wider acceptance in recent years thanks to new genre-bending productions that combine both traditional and contemporary music such as Chiec ao thien nga (The swan-feathered coat), Kim Van Kieu - adapted from celebrated Nguyen Du’s Truyen Kieu (Tale of Kieu) and Chuyen tinh Lan va Diep (The love story of Lan and Diep).

But he said it was a colossal waste that the plays had been performed in only short one or two-night engagements, he added.

Thach said that operas, plays and musicals should be performed for at least six months or one year, and that they should not televised, as is the norm in most developed countries.

He said that with so few performances and such meager incomes, Vietnamese artists have to rely on part-time jobs to sustain themselves.

“But we also need to be selective about what to learn from our foreign colleagues, to ensure wholly Vietnamese productions,” Thach noted.

Reported by Do Tuan