DIVERSITY, CULTURAL DIFFERENCE, AND THE GLOBAL MUSICAL

How an increasingly international industry navigates a complicated issue, featuring a Korean musical about Frida Kahlo and insights from some of Broadway's top producers

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A promo image for the Korean musical Frida. Photo: Courtesy of EMK Musical Company and USC Visions and Voices

Broadway may still be waiting for its Frida Kahlo musical—but the Koreans already have one. And it’s so popular that it’s coming back for a third run in Seoul just three years after it premiered there.

By the time an authorized musical biography of Kahlo—sanctioned by the estate of the famed Mexican artist, and featuring music by Mexican composer Jaime Lozano—announced its intentions in 2022, the Korean musical Frida had already wrapped up its first run in Seoul earlier that year. Just this week, EMK Musical Company, one of South Korea’s biggest producers of musical theater, launched the publicity campaign for its upcoming return (June 17-Sept. 7).

From the perspective of the Korean market, the show seems a natural fit for an audience that has long embraced musicals delving into the stories behind big names in history (Elisabeth) and the arts (Beethoven: The Secret). But from the POV of Broadway and the West End, where identity and authenticity are valued at a premium, Frida looks like a startling cultural collision—one that raises questions about how a Korean team of creators and actors can do justice to the story of a figure so steeped in Mexican history and identity.

I first got wind of Frida back when it had its American premiere in a one-night-only showing as part of the Voices and Visions program at the University of Southern California, where the musical was presented prior to an onstage panel discussion between USC faculty and the show’s creatives about “the ethics of cross-cultural representation in art.” The project crystalizes the complexities that arise when theatermakers bring stories and works of art across borders—something now happening with greater frequency than ever as more and more markets begin to think globally.

“Honestly, I think it’s the question of the times,” says Kim Varhola, an American scholar who, after a career in the U.S. as a Broadway actor and a theater marketer, moved to Seoul in 2013 and now teaches drama and musical theater at Keimyung University in Daegu.

I got the chance to see Frida at USC, and in the months since, I’ve talked to creators, producers, licensors and academics from around the world about all the ways they think about respecting cultural difference while advocating for their core beliefs around diversity and identity. With Frida now gearing up for its latest run in Seoul, here’s what I’ve learned.

In this SPOTLIGHT STORY, I’ll highlight

• what Korean creatives spotlight in the story of Frida—and what they gloss over,

• the backstory of Frida and its creation, as told by its lead Korean producer at EMK,

• the questions raised by telling stories of racial difference in a monoethnic nation,

• how an interest in cross-cultural accessibility and a desire for representation can come into conflict, and

• how some of Broadway’s biggest international players approach cultural difference, with insights from leaders at Disney Theatrical, the globally expanding Michael Jackson musical MJ, and more.

AT FIRST I WAS LIKE: UGH

Early in that post-performance panel discussion at USC, the playwright Luis Alfaro, who is the director of the university’s MFA Dramatic Writing Program, said what a lot of us in the crowd were probably already thinking when faced with the idea of a Frida Kahlo musical from creators who had no ties to Mexican culture.

“At first I was like: Ugh,” he said. “Just have to name it and acknowledge it.”

He had introduced himself by saying, “I am a Chicano. I’m a politicized Mexican-American. Frida Kahlo, for us, is almost a religious figure in Mexican culture. Frida is not only her artwork, but she also represents something very important to Mexican culture. She represents spirit, endurance, the ability that we as people of color have to continue on and endure.” Which is to say that as he watched the show that night, the personal, cultural, and political stakes were high.

But as the musical played out, “something very beautiful happened,” he explained. “Music and musicals make us all larger than life, and allow us to filter and see ourselves in each other. So today I was thinking: Yeah, you can borrow our Frida. We’re happy to let you.”

It was a thoughtful, nuanced response—the kind you never see on social media—that both acknowledged the complexities and pitfalls of cross-cultural storytelling while also meeting the show on its own terms, in the good faith with which it was intended.

Created by director-lyricist-book writer Jung Hwa Choo and composer Soo Hyun Heo, Frida finds the legendary artist (1907-1954) recounting the events of her life in a talk show that takes place in her mind at the moment she takes her final breath. Its small cast of four women portray various aspects of Kahlo herself as well as the people in the artist’s life.

Sitting in the audience that night, I was struck by the musical’s seeming lack of interest in the greater historical and political context of Kahlo’s life story, or even the deeper motifs and cultural impact of Kahlo’s art itself. Instead, the creators focus on her development as an artist through the physical hardships of polio and the bus accident that she barely survived at 18 years old, and that caused her pain for the rest of her life. Her relationship with Diego Rivera, the equally influential artist she married in 1929, also looms large in her story—although rather than exploring the interplay of their art and politics throughout their tumultuous marriage, Frida concentrates mostly on Kahlo enduring Rivera’s many infidelities.

To me, it felt like a story shorn of all the specificity and complexity that might make it compelling. But for its Korean creators, Kahlo’s biography becomes a story of creativity’s triumph over hardship and of female empowerment.