He brought The Beatles to perform: To Be Continued is a love letter to ‘Hong Kong’s first impresario’, Harry Odell, and to the city
- The showman who brought Isaac Stern, Cliff Richard and Soviet artists to the city is remembered in a documentary that’s as much about the pair who made it
This is the story of one passion project that gave birth to another. It begins with an ardent, cigar-chewing individual called Harry Odell, usually described as Hong Kong’s first impresario.
In the late 1940s he set up a film distribution company and, for a while, owned the huge Empire Theatre in the city’s North Point neighbourhood, built in 1952.
Odell’s dream was to bring world-class performing artists to the city. The Polish violinist Isaac Stern played at the Empire in 1953, as did the French cellist Pierre Fournier.
But by the time the Chinese Folk Artists Group from Guangzhou appeared in 1956 – the first Hong Kong visit by a troupe from mainland China since the Communist revolution in 1949 – the Empire was losing its lustre. (“Decrepit”, thought the South China Morning Post’s critic.)
The following year, the Empire closed, and when it reopened in 1959, it was renamed the State Theatre and had become a cinema.
