Marie Curie – A New Musical Journey from Seoul to London

🧪 Storytelling with Radium and Responsibility

The musical follows Maria Skłodowska-Curie, tracing her groundbreaking discovery of radium and its potential for healing. Yet as the element finds commercial application in factories, tragedy strikes—the workers exposed to radium begin to suffer from radiation poisoning. This sets the stage for a moral dilemma: should a scientist continue championing discovery despite unintended consequences? The narrative’s power lies in its refusal to glorify genius uncritically. Instead, it interrogates the weight of knowledge, especially when women bear both its triumphs and consequences.

🇰🇷 Korean Origins and Global Intentions

Premiering in 2020 at Seoul’s Chungmu Art Center, Marie Curie was produced with international expansion in mind from the outset. The creative team—book and lyrics by Seeun Choun, music by Jongyoon Choi—sought to tell a universal story rooted in the specificity of Curie’s gender, nationality, and scientific legacy. The show’s themes of discrimination, responsibility, and female resilience resonated widely. It was later streamed online, attracting nearly 800,000 viewers, and won top honors at the 5th Korea Musical Awards, including Best Book, Music, Director, and Producer.

Subsequent performances expanded its domestic reach, culminating in a six-city Korean tour from 2023 to 2024. International exposure followed: a 2021 filmed presentation during Korea Culture Week in Warsaw led to an invitation to the 2022 Music Gardens Festival, where it received the Grand Prix and a glowing endorsement from Marie Curie’s descendant, Hanna Karzewska. Performances in Japan followed, and by late 2023, a full showcase was presented in London in preparation for an English-language run.

🎭 Charing Cross Theatre Run: English-Language Premiere

The London production at Charing Cross Theatre (June 1–July 28, 2024) in West End marks a significant milestone: it is the first full-length, long-run Korean musical performed in English with a local cast and creative team in the West End area. Directed by Sarah Meadows and adapted into English by Tom Ramsay (book) and Emma Fraser (lyrics), the cast features Alisa Davidson as Marie Curie, Chrissie Bhima as Anne Kowalska, Thomas Josling as Pierre Curie, and Richard Meek as Ruben.

The creative team includes Rose Montgomery (set/costume), Prema Mehta (lighting), and Joanna Goodwin (choreography)—whose work, though unexpected in a scientific biography, added movement that accentuated emotional tensions without diluting gravitas. The production is managed by Aria Entertainment and produced by Byungwon Kang and LIVE Corp., with literal translation support by Ahreumbi Rew.

📰 Reception and Cultural Reflections

Marie Curie received mixed but respectful reviews during its London run.

The Guardian noted that while Jongyoon Choi’s score was energetically performed, it occasionally lacked emotional layering. The review found the dialogue filled with clichés and a resolution that sidestepped ethical discomfort in favor of sentimentality. Still, the show’s themes — the commercial impact of radium and Curie’s inner conflict — were acknowledged as compelling.

In contrast, Whatsonstage offered a more favorable response, praising the production’s visual strength — particularly Matt Powell’s projections and Prema Mehta’s lighting. The show was commended for avoiding the trap of romanticizing its heroine. The duet between Marie and Anne Kowalska stood out for its emotional weight, while Ailsa Davidson’s portrayal of Curie was lauded for balancing scientific clarity with vulnerability. Chrissie Bhima, as Anne, anchored the story’s ethical and emotional arc.

TheArtsDesk echoed similar sentiments, stating that the musical handled complex material with clarity, if not always originality. It praised the show’s feminist framing but noted the absence of a singular musical identity that could set it apart in an already crowded field of message-driven musicals.

Beyond London, the show's cultural positioning has prompted deeper reflection. A JoongAng Ilbo commentary noted that staging a musical about Marie Curie in Europe — particularly in her native Poland — might appear audacious, akin to Western creators writing a musical about a pioneering Korean woman during the Joseon Dynasty. Yet, the Polish response was overwhelmingly warm.

Producer Park So-yeon of LIVE Corp., which developed the show for international stages, recalled:

“We were concerned, since Poland considers Marie Curie a national treasure. But the audience didn’t focus on that. They were deeply moved by the idea of a musical about science — they told us it was unexpected and refreshing. There was a standing ovation. The Marie Curie Museum in Warsaw even ran a six-month exhibit featuring our production’s miniatures and merchandise.”

This cross-cultural resonance demonstrates how Marie Curie, though a product of Korean musical theatre, speaks to broader human themes — not only gender and ethics, but also the enduring legacy of knowledge. Far from being limited by national origin, it affirms the potential of Korean original musicals to contribute meaningfully to global stages.

🌍 A Korean Musical with Global Traction
Marie Curie is not merely a biographical project; it’s a marker of the expanding footprint of Korean original musicals in the West. Its creators constructed a narrative with global relevance: a female scientist navigating acclaim, ethics, and sexism in a world both awed and threatened by her intellect. The fact that the production now graces the London stage with such structural fidelity and thematic clarity speaks to the growing sophistication and ambition of Korean musical theatre.

With planned future expansions—including a Polish licensing run—Marie Curie stands as a testament not only to its namesake’s brilliance, but to a global creative industry newly receptive to Korean voices and visions.


Final Notes

The musical rightly shows that Curie refused to patent radium — a choice consistent with her ethic of making discoveries freely available to science [1][2][3]. However, it then invents a subplot in which she is entangled in industrial and medical misuse of the element, even confessing hesitation to stop harmful applications for fear of halting her research.

Historical records show otherwise. Curie never concealed radium’s dangers, nor did she oversee factories, clinical trials, or animal experiments [4]. She focused on fundamental research and measurement, while later industrial and medical uses of radium developed independently — sometimes disastrously, as in the 1920s Radium Girls tragedy in the United States [5].

What defined Curie’s legacy was not moral compromise but integrity: she and Pierre built their own instruments, crushed tons of ore to isolate fractions of radium, and pursued knowledge with honesty and selflessness. She refused commercial gain, choosing instead to share discoveries with the world. That ethic, not fictional guilt, is central to her historical importance[6][7].

References
[1] Quinn, Susan. Marie Curie: A Life. Perseus Publishing, 1995. ISBN: 978-0201408261
[2] Smithsonian Magazine. “When Women Crowdfunded Radium for Marie Curie”
[3] Deutsches Patent- und Markenamt. “Marie Curie – Ingenious Women”
[4] Encyclopædia Britannica. “Marie Curie’s mobile X-ray labs in World War I”
[5] Emling, Shelley. Marie Curie and Her Daughters. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ISBN: 978-0230115712. Crawford, E., Heilbron, J.L., & Ullrich, R. The Nobel Population 1901–1937. Office for History of Science and Technology, UC Berkeley, 1987.
[6] Curie, Marie. Pierre Curie. Translated by Charlotte and Vernon Kellogg. Macmillan, 1923.
[7] Original writings and laboratory notes archived at Musée Curie, Paris