When the incubation program kicked off last December, 77 musicals were submitted, with five winners selected at the end of the judging process. The five winners then got to work with a team of theater industry insiders, musicians and other professionals to polish their creations. After several rounds of script-reading, revisions, rehearsals and workshops, the festival provided 200,000 yuan for each of the final three production teams, which allowed them to stage a 45-minute showcase at the Huangpu Theater on Dec 7. The incubation program cost less than 2 million yuan.

"It is a process of filtering through seeds and nurturing them to see which ones will grow into a big tree," says Fei, who has been involved in the musical industry since the first Broadway production of Les Miserables was presented at Shanghai Grand Theater in 2002.

"We have successfully built a working mechanism and created the rules. Anyone is welcome to come and give it a go."

Fei points out that the incubation program will return in 2020.

The reception to these initiatives has been heartening. In the past eight years of promoting Chinese musicals with Shanghai Times Square, Fei says that he has seen a sea change in the industry.

"I used to have difficulty finding enough Chinese productions to showcase. Now, I often have to turn down requests to show their plays."

According to professor Wang Luoyong, the head of the musical department at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and a veteran Broadway actor, the process had a lot in common with the creation of new Broadway shows. He notes that even internationally acclaimed musicals such as Rent went through humble preliminary rehearsals using buckets as drums, and that only a small amount of investment was required for each round of script-reading, rehearsals and revisions.

The three winning plays from the first incubation program consist of a thriller about a teenage survival game, a contemporary interpretation of the life of Li Yu, a legendary poet from 1,000 years ago, and a fantasy love story involving time travel.

"We are still taking our first steps in creating original musicals," says theater director Gao Ruijia, a mentor on the incubation program. "You will only be able to achieve steady development after you have mastered these first steps."

There are as yet no plans to push any of these plays into the commercial phase, but professor Jin Fuzai with the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, who is also a mentor on the incubation program, says that the three productions have great potential to progress to the live show market.

Ayanga, a young actor who played the lead role in the 2017 Chinese adaptation of the Korean musical My Bucket List at Shanghai Culture Square, is optimistic about the development of local productions. The ambassador for the 2020 Shanghai International Musical Festival, Ayanga achieved national fame last year through the reality show Super Vocal on Hunan TV.

"It was in Shanghai that my career began to take off and I believed that the golden age would soon come for musicals in China. I am excited to discover that this time has finally come," says Ayanga.

Shanghai Culture Square has announced that six Chinese productions will be presented during the second Shanghai International Musical Festival in March. Among them is Spring in Shanghai, a story about Chinese revolutionaries in the early 20th century which features rising star Fang Shujian, West Chamber, an ancient Chinese love story starring Liu Yan, a new idol born from the reality TV show Super Vocal, and Nine Colored Deer, a fairy-tale play with music composed by Howard Moody from Britain.

Shanghai Culture Square also announced that there will be a preferential ticket policy where audience members can enjoy a 20 percent discount if they buy a set of two tickets. Fei points out that having such a policy is important as watching a theater production can be quite an expensive affair compared with other forms of entertainment.

"We have to provide high quality shows that enhance people's confidence in the theater," he says. "Otherwise, they might be lured into the theater by one play but eventually turn away from it after being disappointed by another."