He brought The Beatles to perform: To Be Continued is a love letter to ‘Hong Kong’s first impresario’, Harry Odell, and to the city

The showman who brought Isaac Stern, Cliff Richard and Soviet artists to the city is remembered in a documentary that’s as much about the pair who made it

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Harry Odell got The Beatles and Cliff Richard to perform in Hong Kong, and now he is brought back to life in a meticulously researched documentary. Photo: SCMP

Published: 7:45am, 14 May 2023Updated: 7:53am, 14 May 2023

This is the story of one passion project that gave birth to another. It begins with an ardent, cigar-chewing individual called Harry Odell, usually described as Hong Kong’s first impresario.

In the late 1940s he set up a film distribution company and, for a while, owned the huge Empire Theatre in the city’s North Point neighbourhood, built in 1952.

Odell’s dream was to bring world-class performing artists to the city. The Polish violinist Isaac Stern played at the Empire in 1953, as did the French cellist Pierre Fournier.

But by the time the Chinese Folk Artists Group from Guangzhou appeared in 1956 – the first Hong Kong visit by a troupe from mainland China since the Communist revolution in 1949 – the Empire was losing its lustre. (“Decrepit”, thought the South China Morning Post’s critic.)

The following year, the Empire closed, and when it reopened in 1959, it was renamed the State Theatre and had become a cinema.

An image in a 1958 issue of the South China Morning Post shows how the then under-construction Empire Theatre was expected to look when finished. Photo: SCMP

Odell, however, kept his faith in live performance; he would subsequently bring such acts to Hong Kong as Benny Goodman, Herman’s Hermits, Lionel Hampton, Cliff Richard, the Carpenters and The Beatles.