New musical brings high-energy world of K-pop to Broadway

NEW YORK — There are some familiar storylines in a new musical opening on Broadway — a singer and her relationship with the mentor who guided her; a newcomer trying to find his place; young women chasing their dreams. These are the questions that I asked myself.” In the initial stage version of the show, Kim was introducing the machine of K-pop to an American audience largely unfamiliar with it; five years later, it’s been rewritten for a world where K-pop musical heavy-hitters like BTS and Blackpink are pop chart mainstays, amid a slew of other Korean entertainment in movies and television like “Squid Games” becoming more popular in the U.S. as well. He called the timing “really serendipitous.” “It’s been really profound and moving actually to watch the world shift in this way.” A Broadway musical showcasing the sounds of K-pop is a sign of how “the U.S. is finally catching up with what was already going on around the world,” said Robert Ji-Song Ku, an associate professor of Asian American studies at Binghamton University. “K-pop and Broadway have both been my passion for a long time; K-pop has been like comfort food for me, and Broadway was my seemingly unattainable dream, given there haven’t been many Asian composers, let alone Asian female composers that I can see and dream to be like,” she said in an email. It’s “a way to be really authentic to the experience of K-pop idols and Korean people,” Kim said, pointing out that “when I speak to my mom, I’m switching back and forth all the time, depending on what we’re talking about.” “The design of the bilingual nature of the show was very intentional.” Clearly, a musical built around K-pop has a built-in base of potential audience members.