Students in a choreography class at the Joop van den Enden Academy in Hamburg, where performers spend three years training for careers as musical performers. The curriculum embraces acting, singing and dance.

By Florian Sanktjohanser

For 15 rounds, the blows have been landing on Rocky Balboa’s body. But he’s still on his feet.
The setting is a rotating boxing ring in the Operettenhaus theatre on the Reeperbahn boulevard of Hamburg and this fight is scripted.
Rocky is battling Apollo Creed yet again for the world title, an epic battle of the underdog against the overwhelming favourite, in the dramatic final scene of Rocky.
The audience is clapping to the driving music, fists are flying in the flashing red-white-and-blue lights, sweat is catapulting off the boxers’ bodies during the world premiere of Rocky, the musical.
It is based on the boxing film Rocky from 1976, an American classic. Co-producer Sylvester Stallone was on hand for the premiere. And Hamburg has landed yet another entertainment spectacle.
“After London and New York, Hamburg is the world’s third-largest musicals city,” the city’s economy minister, Frank Horch, proudly noted as he announced construction of a fifth musical theatre in the city.
The three-storey facility will be completely integrated into the Grossmarkthalle, a brick, 19th-century former market hall near the main train station. It will seat some 2,000 people.
Meanwhile a fourth theatre is going up in the city’s port area. Now a skeleton of concrete and steel, it is to be opened in 2014. With 1,800 seats it will be slightly more modest, but for that, it will be cloaked in a gleaming skin of shingles made of precious metal.
Right next door, in the Stage Theater, the proud ‘Koenig der Loewen’ — the Lion King — is majestically prowling through the jungle, as he has been doing for 11 years now, holding more than 8mn viewers so far in his thrall.
Such figures underscore how musicals are a powerful tourism magnet, pulling in visitors from all over Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Each year some 2mn people visit the three large-scale music theatres belonging to the Stage Entertainment company.
A newcomer, Mehr Entertainment, will be joining the fray when it opens the Grossmarkthalle theatre in late 2014 or early 2015. There is speculation that its musical fare could be Cats, Shrek or Spider Man.
 “Investors are lining up to open new venues and launch new productions,” says Sascha Albertsen, spokesman for the Hamburg Tourism Office. “Musicals are perhaps the most important factor for tourism in Hamburg.” Some 1,000 jobs are now linked to musicals. The Hamburg musicals story goes back to the 1980s, when producer Friedrich Kurz got to know Andrew Lloyd Webber and brought Webber’s hit Cats to the city on the Elbe.
Kurz was given the run-down Operettenhaus in Hamburg’s St Pauli district rent-free, and he set up business deals with hotels, travel operators and the German railway.
His plan worked. Cats, launched in 1986, ran for 15 years and drew more than 6mn people. Then came The Phantom of the Opera in 1990 for which Kurz spent 80mn marks ($40mn then) to build the Neue Flora theatre. Currently Tarzan is playing in the Neue Flora and is to run until the autumn of 2013. After that, Phantom of the Opera might make a comeback.
Perhaps one of the roles then will be given to a young man or woman currently being put through the paces up on the sixth floor of a former warehouse building in the Elbe harbour. The four women and one man, dressed in tank tops and trainers, closely study the moves of a tap-dance and jazz dance teacher from the United States. Then they take the floor, trying to master the steps and moves and grooves of a dance number.
The pupils in the Joop van den Enden Academy might justly think of themselves as the elite. Out of 400 applicants, the musical school of Stage Entertainment usually picks just 10 to 12.
For six semesters they study acting, singing and dancing. Many work from 8am until 10pm six days a week to hone their talents. Even then, they cannot count on landing a role in a Hamburg’s musical.
It may be that exclusively German-language musicals are performed in Hamburg. But competing for the roles are actors from the world over. The lead roles in Rocky, for example, are performed by two American men and a Dutch woman.
Children training a floor lower and learning how to move like lions, have a greater chance. It is conceivable that one of them will become the new Simba.
An end to the run of Lion King is nowhere in sight — that musical machine is still humming along in high gear. — DPA