K-MUSICALS ARE COMING FOR BROADWAY

Spotlight on the bustling South Korean theater industry—and its remarkable push to make musicals an export business

“Seoul” by Joon Kyu Park. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Annyeonghaseyo and welcome to the second issue of Jaques, your biweekly guide to the international theater industry. Big, big thanks to the many subscribers who’ve signed on in the early weeks of this new project. Your support means the world to me. (New to Jaques? Check out this introductory post.)

In this edition of Jaques we’re heading to South Korea, which over the last two decades has grown into one of the biggest markets in the world for musical theater. But first, let’s spin the globe to see what’s happening in other parts of the world.

ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS

• A new musical version of The Great Gatsby with international ambitions opened at the Paper Mill Playhouse with the busy South Korean production firm OD Company among its backers. With a cast led by Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada, a score by Paradise Square duo Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen and a book by Kait Kerrigan (The Mad Ones), the show earned notices that ranged from raves to pans. Falling somewhere between the two extremes, critic Brittani Samuel gave it a measured review in the New York Times with particular praise for the cast, the design and the score’s solo songs, but reservations about the “blunter approach” of an adaptation that leaves the story “stripped of compelling subtext and Fitzgerald’s enviable prose.”

• West Side Story returned to Paris for a third time after popular runs in 2007 and 2012. Lonny Price directs the international tour (produced by Germany’s Mehr-BB) at Théâtre du Châtelet, where the show runs through the holidays. Across town, actor-producer-director Pierre-François Martin-Laval’s revival of his own French staging of Spamalot has settled in for a winter run at Théâtre de Paris just as the Broadway revival gears up to open next week.

• The Japanese-language replica production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child celebrated its first anniversary in Tokyo, where its enduring popularity earned it a feature in Japan News. As on Broadway, the Tokyo show is the shorter, one-part iteration of the story, trimmed down from the original two-evening marathon.

• There’s a non-replica production of Chicago in Berlin from director Barrie Kosky at the Komische Oper. Critic A.J. Goldman of the New York Times was into it, noting in his review that after Kosky’s prior stagings of The Threepenny Opera, Fiddler on the Roof and Candide, this Chicago “offered further proof, if any was needed, that Kosky has made the Komische Oper—which has always embraced various forms of music theater—the best place for classic American musicals on the continent.”

• Across India there are numerous versions of the Ramlila—a dramatic re-enactment of the life of the Hindu god Rama, taken from the Ramayana and other sources—but only one of them bills itself as Broadway Ramlila. A high-tech, three-hour musical spectacle with a cast of more than 100, the show recently wrapped a run in Delhi. The production’s been around since 2015 and was the first Ramlila to be shown in cinemas.

• Titanic the Musical has been busy. The latest staging, produced by Danielle Tarento, originated as a UK tour celebrating the 10th anniversary of the show’s London premiere and now it’s traveling Asia, where it just opened in Beijing. At the same time, a filmed version of the production, captured live onstage in the U.K., hit cinemas Nov. 4 in the first of two special event screenings. (The second is set for Nov. 8.)

• The increasingly international online ticketer TodayTix tapped Liza Lefkowski, a VP at e-commerce giant Wayfair, for its board of directors. Lefkowski’s addition looks like a strategic move to bolster plans for ongoing growth at TodayTix, which started in New York just 10 years ago and has since expanded to the U.K. and Australia.

SPOTLIGHT: SOUTH KOREA

Hard to believe now, but musical theater wasn’t really a thing in Seoul until 2001. That’s when the first Korean-language production of The Phantom of the Opera ignited a local passion for the form and opportunity exploded. South Korea has been on Broadway’s radar at least since its booming theater scene got a Times write-up a decade ago, and since then the market has only become more vibrant, more profitable and more crowded with competition.

In this issue’s SPOTLIGHT STORY, I highlight:

• the fast facts on South Korea’s theater industry, including box office totals, the most desirable theater in town and Seoul’s biggest musical star

• the leading local producers making international moves

• the cultural and business factors that dictate run length in Seoul—and the worries the situation is spurring Stateside

• an insider’s view of the industry-wide efforts to make a K-musical that has the cultural reach of BTS, Squid Game and Parasite

EXPORT EXPECTATIONS

Over the course of one week late last month, two English-language, invite-only readings of Korean-born musicals were held in midtown Manhattan to garner feedback—and, ideally, interest—from New York producers. At the same time, a cohort of nine independent Korean producers, brought over by a nonprofit organization funded by the South Korean government, attended a series of seminars to learn the financial nitty-gritty of producing on Broadway. And just across the Hudson River, the head of South Korea’s OD Company, one of the most prominent producers of musical theater in Seoul, was in Millburn, N.J. for the Paper Mill Playhouse premiere of The Great Gatsby, the new musical that OD Company is backing with an eye toward international success.

If it all seems like a full-court press, that’s because it is.