K-pop stars taking centre stage
SOUTH KOREA’S BOOMING MUSIC INDUSTRY is lending its top talents to lucrative imported Broadway productions
His acting was all smiles and scowls, and his dancing fell short of Broadway calibre, but Yang Yoseop, at 23, was an old pro at exuding heartache. Which was all that really mattered.
At a recent performance here of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, the Andrew Lloyd Webber/ Tim Rice rock musical, the 1,000-strong audience fell into a mesmerized silence every time the spotlight fell on Yang, a sweet-faced star in the multibillion-dollar South Korean pop music industry. The hush broke only once, when Yang, playing the much-abused son of the biblical Jacob, sang a Korean translation of Joseph’s power ballad Close Every Door. As he belted about hardship and hope, young women wept.
“He looked like he did in Caffeine,” said Jung Jeongun, 17, during the intermission, referring to Yang’s recent K-pop video. “‘You’re bad to me, so bad to me, oh girl, you’re like caffeine,’ ” Jung quoted. “Yoseop’s hurt feels very deep. I love him.”
So much so that she had already bought another $80 ticket to his next performance in Joseph.
Imagine Justin Bieber in a Broadway show, and the hottest trend in Seoul’s $300-million theatre market — which is crowded with U.S. and European musicals — starts making sense. Not unlike Broadway’s star casting of movie and television actors like Daniel Craig and Bryan Cranston, producers here have been increasingly hiring K-pop stars, as well as South Korean soap opera actors and other celebrities, to perform two or three times a week in major roles (with other actors handling the other nights) in exchange for the prestige of roles and payments of up to $50,000 per appearance.
This fusing of homegrown performers with U.S. and European shows has meant big money here — and lucrative royalties and fees for the show creators — by turning women in their teens, 20s and 30s into devoted and repeat customers. In the theatre lobbies of Joseph, Grease and Bonnie & Clyde this fall, they snapped photos of each other standing beside lifesize cut-outs of their K-pop stars in costume. At Ghost the Musical, a Broadway flop that has opened its first Asian production here, competing fan groups used a large scale near the box office to weigh rice donations they made to charities on behalf of the musical’s K-pop and soap stars. And television and radio advertising emphasize the K-pop stars first and the show titles second for the dozens of musicals running across this city.
“Ten years ago, five years ago, ticket sales depended on a musical coming from Broadway or London or having a Tony Award, but today, K-pop casting has become the No. 1 criteria for a lot of shows,” said Chang Jun-won, a talent agent turned producer here whose latest show is a Korean version of Murder Ballad.
After he saw Murder in New York, he called one of his K-pop clients and said, “I’ve found something for you.” She is now starring in it.
“The stars bring in women, but they’re also famous enough to bring in Japanese and Chinese tourists, whom we need badly to keep growing our market,” he added.
K-pop is known for its high cuteness factor, fast-paced choreography and seductive winks, smiles and double takes, as well as lyrics that tend toward frothy fun or breakup boo-hoo. The music has become one of South Korea’s most lucrative exports, propelling the so-called Korean Wave of culture through Asia while exploding into a YouTube phenomenon in the United States and elsewhere, thanks largely to the viral video Gangnam Style, by the singer Psy.
A few Korean theatre producers are trying to ride this wave by putting K-pop stars into Broadway musicals and staging tours of the shows in Japan; a K-pop-laden Jack the Ripper was a popular export to Tokyo last year. The goal is to take these tours to China, once its enormous market opens up further to outside theatrical productions. But for now, most theatre activity is centered in Seoul, a city of about 10 million people. Producers focus on rotating big-name singers into musicals to help them have longer runs. And when those performers are on tour, soap stars and others will suffice, like Lee Ha-ni, a one-time Miss Korea, playing virtuous Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls here.
“There are so many musicals in Seoul now, dozens and dozens, that the stars help ticket buyers make choices,” said Gina Lee, the director of Guys and Dolls, who cast a former K-pop singer, Song Won-geun, as the gambler Sky Masterson.
U.S. producers have certainly tried to capitalize on popstar appeal, too — after all, Donny Osmond has played the title role in Joseph numerous times, and Debbie Gibson dropped into Les Misérables, Cabaret and other Broadway musicals. More recently Nick Jonas returned to Broad- way in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, but his presence failed to generate big ticket sales. New York theatre critics have often bemoaned this stunt casting, and a few Korean producers are starting to worry too.
“The idea of revolving casts of K-pop stars, soap actors and theatre actors doesn’t bode well for a musical, because it can’t guarantee quality when performers change every day,” said Shin Chun-soo, president of the OD Musical Co., which has produced Jekyll & Hyde, Man of La Mancha, Contact, Nine and other Broadway musicals in Seoul.
High quality or not, several shows with iffy pedigrees (they have never made it to Broadway) have enjoyed big ticket sales thanks to K-pop stars, like the European musicals Elizabeth and Mozart, which featured Kim Jun-su of the pop group JYJ. The Three Musketeers sold strongly by having Kpop stars rotating as young romantic hero d’Artagnan. And Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Xanadu also sold well with K-pop stars.
But the reliance on K-pop performers highlights a void in the theatre scene here: the dearth of original Korean musicals.
Musical romance Finding Mr. Destiny was a hit in 2006 (and was mounted in China under the title Finding Mr. Kim), while the most popular original musical here recently was Bungee Jump, a complex love story that involves a young woman who is reincarnated as a man and reunited with her old lover, also a man, leading to scandal.
Hue Park, the lyricist for Bungee Jump, said he drew on his experience writing K-pop lyrics a decade ago, gigs that earned up to $7,000 a song, as he worked on the musical.
“K-pop lyrics repeat the same words over and over and try to be very catchy, memorable, karaoke worthy,” said Park, 30, who collaborated with a U.S. composer, Will Aronson, on the show.
Mastering the English-toKorean translation is only one of the challenges facing the K-pop stars, several of whom said that they dreamed as children about acting on the stage but were pulled into the K-pop world because the talent agencies and musicmaking assembly lines have become so dominant here.
Ock Joo-hyun, who plays Elphaba in Wicked, said that the make-believe world of theatre — like adjusting to green makeup at every performance to play her character, who becomes Wicked Witch of the West — had been unnerving at first.
“I had never been raised in the air before, and I got a little motion sickness the first time on the broom,” said Ock, who then smiled and winked — a K-pop move that seemed almost involuntary to her.
Yang, whose slightly androgynous features were pronounced “cute” and “sweet” by several girls during and after Joseph, said he is trying the theatre for the same reason that some Hollywood stars go to Broadway: to prove something to his fans and to himself.