BREAKING: Hadestown to Premiere in South Korea in August 2021, EXO’s Xiumin to star?
(Photo: Sara Krulwich)
출발합니다, 출발! All aboard! The Tony Award-winning hit Hadestown is going to South Korea. Korean producer S&Co. launched an Instagram account today for Hadestown, premiering in Seoul this year and marking the musical’s first foreign-language production*. It will play a limited run engagement at the LG Art Center in Yeoksam-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul beginning August 2021.**
According to news sites this week, Xiumin of Korean-Chinese K-pop group EXO has been offered the role of Orpheus. Xiumin last appeared onstage in 2019’s “Return: The Promise of the Day,” an original musical that deals with the topic of excavating the remains of the heroic soldiers who sacrificed themselves to protect their country during the Korean War. Having just been discharged from Korea’s mandatory military service period, Xiumin’s possible return to the stage is hotly anticipated.
Written by Anaïs Mitchell, Hadestown premiered Off-Broadway in 2016 at New York Theatre Workshop and played Canadian and London engagements prior to opening on Broadway in 2019. Mitchell's work re-imagines the mythical story of Orpheus and Eurydice with a Tony-winning score that blends modern folk music with New Orleans–style jazz.
Hadestown joins a 2021 Seoul musical season filled with proven-success encore productions alongside new premieres, despite recent COVID-19 hardships in the local industry. Shows this year include encores for the licensed Man of La Mancha and Maury Yeston’s Phantom as well as encores for replica productions of Chicago and Billy Elliot. Hadestown joins this year’s Korean premieres of Great Comet and Beetlejuice.
S&Co is a performance producer specializing in the production, investment, and distribution of domestic and international performances in Korea. It has produced the recent Korean tour presentations of The Phantom of the Opera, The Lion King, Wicked, Cats, and School of Rock. S&Co's work on The Phantom of the Opera and Cats in Korea is also being featured in the upcoming Dori Berinstein-Sammi Cannold documentary “The Show Must Go On.”
Further information on Hadestown, including confirmed casting for the Korean production, to be announced at a later date.
~~
*This is an English-centric contractual term used in English-language-originating production rights that presupposes productions outside of the US, British Isles, and Australia/New Zealand are “Supplemental Territories” in which rights can be vested in original or local language. Theoretically, it is usually followed by a tiered classification of global markets based on perceived profitability. However, the word "foreign" is a relative, vague, and meaningless phrase that only serves to promote a sense of otherness and alienate certain experiences and productions as being literally more valuable than others since it is inherently oriented around the subjective “non-foreign” of three English-speaking territories. \
Delineating the non-English-speaking territories as “Supplemental” further exemplifies harmful, antiquated language entrenched in our contractual processes that relies on classifications made in the Broadway industry after the first major licensing and global touring successes in the 1980s. In the global marketplace of today’s Broadway ecosystem, reliance on outdated and purposefully exoticized and mystified terminology such as these will inevitably 1) hoodwink rightsholders from market realities and 2) bar growingly formidable nonwhite players from larger profit margins. “Original” vs. “Local language” practices should instead be adopted as we navigate global exchange and equity.
** Timing of this production has been previously announced in the Korean musical industry, but published here for the first time (to this author’s knowledge) in English news.