LONDON — Chinese superstar Karen Mok has a mission — to get China to have its own version of London’s West End or New York’s Broadway.
With 17 albums and around 40 films already on her resume, the 49-year-old singer/actress — on the road since last summer with “The Ultimate Karen Mok Show” — said she wants to retire from the pop concert scene.
She’s not quitting music though.
“I’m not retiring because I love the stage too much,” she told The Associated Press on Thursday ahead of her dates in Paris and London this September. “But I feel that in terms of doing pop concerts, I think I’ve pretty much reached like the top, the epitome, because with every solo pop concert, you’re really working with the same material.”
Her “next big mission,” she said, is “to create and produce an original Chinese musical for the Chinese audience and maybe at some point, you know, bring it to the rest of the world.”
Mok even says she’d lend her back catalogue of hits to a ‘Mamma Mia’ style production.
“I’d love to, you know, present my songs in a different way, in a different format, at some point in time I’m not going to be doing my pop concerts anymore,” she said.
“But then I’d like to be able to create like, you know, something huge like, I don’t know, maybe ‘Les Mis,’ (‘Les Miserables’) you know, that sort of thing. So I don’t know, I’m very greedy when it comes to creating content. I want everything.”
It’s no normal retirement then for Mok.