In the early 21st Century, Chinese-language movies, with worldwide hits such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero, looked on their way to becoming credible contenders at the global box office. Thus, when Hollywood filmed Memoirs of a Geisha a decade ago, it cast three Chinese actresses as the Japanese leads because the Chinese stars were burning so bright back then.

It seemed plausible that, with the historic barriers between the movie industries of Hong Kong, Red China, and Taiwan breaking down, the combined Chinese movie juggernaut would be unstoppable. But … that hasn’t really happened.

Since then, Chinese box office has continued to climb, but Hollywood appears to have successfully co-opted the strategic threat by incorporating scenes filmed in China into summer blockbusters.

Over the last seven years, much Chinese cinematic energy have been devoted to countless movies about the curiously named martial arts instructor Ip Man (a.k.a., Yip Man), 1893-1972. Master Ip was an affluent, cultivated Cantonese-speaker from the prosperous and partly Westernized city of Foshan, who fled the Communists to Hong Kong in 1949. There he became the teacher of the young Bruce Lee.

Ip’s life story raises once thorny questions of class and ideology that have been glossed over by turning Ip into a national cultural hero who reluctantly is driven to demonstrate the superiority of Chinese martial arts (and of Confucian culture in general) over those of impudent barbarian conquerors. In 2008’s Ip Man, a Japanese general in 1938 challenges Master Ip to a fight, and in 2010’s Ip Man 2, he fights a bruising British boxer in colonial Hong Kong.

Additional prequels and sequels have emerged, including the big budget artsy The Grandmaster by Wong Kar-wai, which earned Oscar nominations for cinematography and costume a year ago.

I finally saw the original 2008 Ip Man, directed by Hong Kong filmmaker Wilson Yip. A lot of its success stems from being filmed rather in the style of a Broadway musical film, with fights instead of song-and-dance numbers.

Keep in mind that it wasn’t instantly obvious how to translate the classic post-Oklahoma musicals to the silver screen, but over time they got pretty good at it. The decline of the filmed Broadway musical after the 1960s was more due to the decline in melody-writing than in the ability to film musicals. It may seem crazy that Francis Ford Coppola didn’t win Best Director for The Godfather in 1972, until you watch Cabaret and recognize that a case could be made for Bob Fosse’s achievement as well. (After awhile, though, Fosse’s quick-cutting style became so dominant that film directors had a hard time remembering how to film dances created for the stage.)

Ip Man lifts a lot of its style and tone from old Broadway musical films — e.g., the policeman who tries to prevent a fight between two kung fu masters, for example, appears to be the Chinese cousin of Officer Krupke in West Side Story. Since Orientals played a remarkably large role in the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein (e.g., South Pacific, The King and I, and Flower Drum Song), Ip Man’s Golden Age of Broadway aspect makes a certain kind of weird sense.

This got me thinking that, while the Broadway musical no longer has much cultural impact, hit musicals can be tremendous cash cows. Over the years, The Lion King has taken in over a billion dollars at just one Broadway theater, more than any movie has ever made at all the movie theaters in North America.

So why not Ip Man on Broadway? There are lots of Chinese in New York today, and lots of Chinese tourists. (The Japanese general antagonist could be made nobler and more politically correct by giving him a song about how the Chinese should help the Japanese fight the real enemy, the White Man. But then the Nazi-Japan alliance would be signed, so Ip Man isn’t really fighting a fellow Person of Color, he’s actually fighting Hitler, so it’s okay.)

Instead of the roughly ten fights in the movie version, you could have five fights and five songs. (Songwriters aren’t as good anymore, so picking only their five best songs is better than including songs six through ten in quality.) And diminishing returns set in with fights, so five fights would allow them to build in excitement.

Technically, it would be hard to do this, but not impossible. It’s difficult to fake fight and act live, but professional wrestlers do it. And Broadway recently put on a Rocky musical trying to draw in the elusive straight male audience.

Kung fu movie fighters have a tradition of obviously pulling their punches that’s distracting to Americans (we’re used to John Wayne movie-style fistfights with seemingly glancing blows with elaborate follow-throughs that strike us as less clearly fake), but that makes it less of a problem in a big Broadway theater. If I’m sitting in the balcony of a 3,000 seat theater, the fact that the actors pull their punches six inches away from each other’s faces is less of a dealbreaker than if I’m watching a movie.

A little Googling reveals that this is such an obvious idea that some people have been working on Ip Man the Musical in Singapore since 2011. On the other hand, despite financial support from the Singapore government and Nokia and the involvement of a Tony Award winner, I can’t find much evidence that this has been a triumphant smash yet either, so maybe it’s not such a hot idea after all.