Life after pop music: Karen Mok wants to make musicals when she stops singing Canto-pop

Singer loves the stage, but feels she’s reached the top in pop. So she’s on a mission to create ‘an original Chinese musical for the Chinese audience’

She dreams of ‘something huge’ like Les Miserables, and says ‘I’d love to present my songs in a different format’

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Karen Mok reckons she’s done it all in pop music, and is looking to musicals next – “something huge like, I don’t know, maybe Les Miserables”. Photo: Paul Tsang

Published: 4:30pm, 8 Jul 2019Updated: 6:23pm, 8 Jul 2019

Hong Kong singer Karen Mok has a mission – for 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 résumé, the 49-year-old singer/actress – who has been touring The Ultimate Karen Mok Show since the summer of 2018 – says she wants to retire from the pop concert scene. However, she’s not quitting music.

“I’m not retiring because I love the stage too much,” she says ahead of her tour 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 says, is “to create and produce an original Chinese musical for the Chinese audience and maybe at some point, bring it to the rest of the world”.

Karen Mok performs at the KKBOX Music Awards in Taipei in January 2019. The 49-year-old is looking to a career beyond Canto-pop.

Mok even says she’d lend her back catalogue of hits to a Mamma Mia-style production.