One of Broadway’s most visually spectacular touring musicals opens in Haikou this Friday, 20 March, at the Hainan Provincial Song and Dance Theatre. It runs for one week, eight performances only, and then moves on to Beijing. If you’ve been meaning to look into it, now is the time.
The production has already completed a China tour that proved difficult to ignore. Opening in Dongguan last October, the show drew more than 40,000 audience members across five weeks in three cities. The Shanghai run at Culture Square sold beyond 95% capacity with multiple sold-out performances.
What the musical actually is (and why it’s different from the films)
Most people coming to this show carry one of two reference points: the 1971 film with Gene Wilder, warmly remembered and slightly surreal, or the 2005 Tim Burton version with Johnny Depp, darker and more unsettling.
The Broadway musical is neither.
This is a full-scale original production, new songs, new staging, new creative vision, that uses Roald Dahl’s source novel as its foundation rather than either film adaptation. The score was written by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, the team behind Hairspray, who between them hold Tony, Grammy, Emmy and Olivier awards.
The result is something that works simultaneously as a children’s spectacle and as a genuinely funny, occasionally moving piece of musical theatre for adults.
The show runs two hours and twenty-five minutes including a twenty-minute interval. This isn’t a pared-down touring version. It’s the full production, with everything that implies for set design, choreography, and the sheer scale of what ends up on stage.
From London’s West End to Haikou’s stage
The musical premiered at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London’s West End in June 2013 and ran for approximately 1,500 performances over nearly four years. It collected Olivier Award nominations including Best New Musical and won for Best Costume Design, the costumes being among the most visually extravagant elements of the production, something that becomes immediately clear from the first scene.
Broadway followed in 2017 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in New York, directed by Jack O’Brien, a three-time Tony Award winner. The current global tour production is directed by Matt Lenz, who has worked on the show across multiple productions internationally, and carries with it the full creative ambition of those original stagings.
The touring production that reached China is not a stripped-back version built for travel. The set fills a stage. The Oompa-Loompas are real dancers. The chocolate factory, the copper pipes, the towering machinery, the candy room with its giant mushrooms and floating balloons, is physically constructed in front of you. The show is also performed with a live orchestra.
The creative team behind the staging includes a video and projection designer whose previous work includes the global Tina Turner Musical tour, a puppetry designer who created the Dementors for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and an illusion designer who spent a decade collaborating with David Copperfield in Las Vegas. This is what 90-plus years of combined theatrical experience looks like when it arrives on a stage in Hainan.
Eight performances. One week. Here are the details.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory runs at the Hainan Provincial Song and Dance Theatre (海南省歌舞剧院) in Haikou from 20–26 March 2026.
The performance schedule is as follows. Friday 20 March: one evening show at 8pm. Saturday 21 and Sunday 22 March: two shows each day at 3pm and 8pm. Tuesday 24, Wednesday 25 and Thursday 26 March: one evening show each night at 8pm. Eight performances in total.
Ticket prices run from 280 RMB to 980 RMB for most performances, with a 100 RMB tier available for the 25 and 26 March shows. Tickets are available via Damai (大麦) and other major Chinese ticketing platforms. Given the sell-out pattern elsewhere on this tour, early booking is the sensible approach.
For a full practical guide to attending, including how to choose your ticket tier, what to expect on the night, and what the show is actually like inside the theatre, see our companion piece: Your Complete Guide to Seeing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in Haikou.
Scan the Qr code to purchase tickets
(Parent-Child Package) — 3 tickets
- 980 RMB tier: 3 tickets for 2,688 RMB
- 880 RMB tier: 3 tickets for 2,388 RMB
- 680 RMB tier: 3 tickets for 1,888 RMB
(Family Package) — 5 tickets
- 980 RMB tier: 5 tickets for 4,388 RMB
- 880 RMB tier: 5 tickets for 3,888 RMB
- 680 RMB tier: 5 tickets for 2,988 RMB
480 / 280 / 100 RMB tiers do not qualify for package pricing.
Related article: Your Complete Guide to Seeing Charlie and The Chocolate Factory in Haikou
