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Opinion
Wanted in Hong Kong: the theatrical equivalent of a hawker centre
Raze Hong Kong Stadium, which has outlived its purpose, and build a theatre village in its place to establish the city as a global cultural powerhouse
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Mathias Woo is co artistic director and executive director of Zuni Icosahedron.
On a Saturday evening, Causeway Bay crackles with its famous retail energy, yet by 9 o’clock the streets begin their nightly death. There is nowhere magnetic to spill into – no late-night jazz den, immersive dinner theatre or playhouse humming with an experimental musical. Nearby, the 40,000-seat Hong Kong Stadium squats in silence while the catering rooms of the Happy Valley racecourse sit largely empty on non-race nights.
This dead zone between one of the world’s densest shopping districts and a historic sporting valley is a failure of urban imagination. The remedy is hiding in plain sight: demolish the obsolete stadium and replace it with a dense, dining-infused cluster of at least 20 small to medium-sized theatres, physically linked to both the racecourse and the Lee Garden retail corridor.
International producers of first-run musicals routinely bypass our city. The hottest Broadway and West End transfers increasingly open in Shanghai or Shenzhen. The issue is simple: venue supply rather than audience taste or ticket pricing. Hong Kong’s cultural infrastructure remains trapped in a binary: a few cavernous halls or shoebox black boxes.
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