Global Utopia and Local Anxiety on the Stage of the Korean Musical

The purpose of this essay is three-fold: to trace the genealogy of the Korean musical, which ever since its inception in the 1960s has been seeking to modernize Korean theater with Broadway as a constant role model; to investigate how the national and the global conflict and are conflated in the form of the Korean musical in the process of its (dis)identification with Broadway; and to examine how its intercultural translations reveal and reflect the dilemma and ambivalence posed by globalization in our era. Drawing on Richard Dyer's signature article Entertainment and Utopia, I analyze how the Korean musical manifests and conduits competing utopian impulses of Korean/Global audiences. I also attempt to problematize the formulaic notion of Broadway musicalsthe Superior Other!which implies a global hegemony that does not, in fact, exist because the boundary between the global and the local as well as the power dynamics of global culture are not fixed but constantly moving and changing. Today's musical scene in Korea shows interesting reversals from the 1990s, when Korean producers were eager to debut on Broadway and impress American audiences. Korean producers no longer look up to Broadway as a final destination; instead they want to make Seoul a new Broadway. They import Broadway musicals and turn them into Korean shows. The glamor of Broadway is no longer the main attraction of musicals in Korea. What young audiences look for most is the glamor of K-pop idols and utopian feelings of abundance, energy, intensity, transparency and community, which they can experience live in the musical with their favorite stars right in front of their eyes. In conclusion, I delve into the complex dynamics of recent Korean musicals with Thomas Friedman's theory of Globalization 3.0 as reference. The binary formula of Global/America versus Local/Korea cannot be applied to the dynamic and intercultural musical scene of today. Globalization is not a uniform phenomenon but rather a twofold (multifold) process of global domination and dissemination, in which the global and the local conflict and are conflated constantly. As this study tries to illuminate, the Korean musical has evolved in a huge net of interdependences between the global and the local with a range of sources, powers and influences.