SYNOPSIS

Retired post office worker Shim Deok-chul, now 76 years old, is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s dementia. His doctor advises him to develop the habit of taking notes and to continue training his memory. Deok-chul keeps the diagnosis secret from his family. Instead, he becomes obsessed with a memory from childhood: seeing ballet dancers while briefly living in Russia with his father many decades earlier. Late in life, he decides to finally learn ballet.

Meanwhile, 23-year-old Lee Chae-rok struggles to survive. Once a promising ballet prodigy who won the Lausanne Competition, he suffered a serious ankle injury and now works delivery jobs while his father remains hospitalized. Unable to pay medical bills and abandoned by the ballet foundation that once supported him, Chae-rok claims he no longer loves ballet.

Deok-chul visits a ballet studio run by former ballerino Moon Kyung-guk and asks to become a student. At that same moment, Chae-rok announces he plans to quit ballet altogether. Hoping to save both men in different ways, Moon asks Chae-rok to teach Deok-chul and encourages Deok-chul to support Chae-rok in return.

Deok-chul’s family reacts differently to his new passion. His son believes an old man should rest quietly instead of learning ballet, while his daughter and granddaughter support him enthusiastically and even begin filming his lessons for social media.

At first, Chae-rok reluctantly teaches him with little enthusiasm. But Deok-chul’s warmth, persistence, and sincere belief in others slowly begin changing the people around him. He encourages injured dancers to return, supports Chae-rok through his emotional collapse, and becomes a beloved presence within the company.

As Deok-chul’s dementia worsens, Chae-rok discovers the notebook filled with reminders and realizes the truth about his condition. Even as memories fade, Deok-chul continues dancing.

Eventually, the ballet company prepares a special performance featuring both Deok-chul and Chae-rok. By the day before the performance, Deok-chul can barely move and no longer recognizes most people around him. Yet when music begins backstage, his body responds instinctively. Remembering Chae-rok for one final moment, he steps onto the stage beside him.

Five years later, Chae-rok returns to Korea as a principal dancer after performing abroad. Deok-chul, now in the final stages of dementia, no longer recognizes even his wife. But when Chae-rok softly asks, “Hello, do you remember me?” Deok-chul smiles brightly one last time before quietly passing away.

Freed from the limits of his failing body, he dances once more alongside the people he loved before slowly disappearing into the darkness beyond the stage.


REVIEW

It felt like a dreamlike story.

Seventy-six-year-old Shim Deok-chul is diagnosed with dementia and decides to begin learning ballet late in life. By chance, he receives lessons from Lee Chae-rok, a former Lausanne Competition winner now struggling after injury and financial collapse. Slowly, awkwardly, Deok-chul learns even the most basic movements, and eventually he is given the chance to stand on stage in a special performance.

In the musical, Deok-chul’s son reduces him to nothing more than “an aging father who sacrificed himself for his family” and tells him that he should simply rest quietly now. To me, that perspective felt strangely arrogant and cruel. Shim Deok-chul is Shim Deok-chul. He married because he loved his wife, raised his children with love, took pride in his work, and lived a life that belonged to him. The moment his entire existence is reduced to “a father who sacrificed himself for others,” his own agency disappears beneath the identities imposed on him by his children.

Everyone carries their own life span. Its length and abundance are never equal, but each person still possesses a life that belongs uniquely to them. Deok-chul’s life simply began a little earlier and reached its ending a little sooner than many others around him. Those who encounter him only in the final years of his decline may mistakenly believe that this frail version was all he ever was.

I say this because many audience reactions I encountered afterward focused almost entirely on “the sacrifices our parents made for us.” Of course, gratitude toward one’s parents is meaningful. But reducing an entire human life to a single phrase like “sacrifice for family” also felt, in its own way, like a quiet insult. A life cannot be summarized so neatly.

Perhaps hidden beneath those emotional responses is another instinctive fear: I do not want to grow old like that. I do not want my life to end that way. Yet everyone eventually travels through similar stages of aging and decline. Only the speed and circumstances differ. In the larger flow of time, even the age gap between father and son becomes surprisingly small. Both are simply human beings moving through similar life cycles.

That is why I found it difficult to view Deok-chul merely as a “self-sacrificing father.” He did not feel like a tragic patriarch who suppressed all personal desire for decades. Rather, he seemed like someone who had already experienced love, joy, family, pride, and fulfillment throughout his life. His marriage, his children, his playful relationship with his granddaughter — these were not obligations he endured but parts of a life he genuinely lived.

Because of that, his decision to study ballet did not feel like the explosive release of a repressed dream. It felt more like an act of honesty toward himself at the end of his life. He was not suddenly becoming a different person. He was simply returning to a beauty that had quietly remained inside him for decades.

Throughout the musical, Deok-chul constantly reaches out to others. He encourages injured dancers to return, insists that Chae-rok still loves ballet, worries about his granddaughter’s future, and tries to support everyone around him. At times he is intrusive, meddlesome, even “old-fashioned.” The musical openly jokes about this by calling him a “kkondae,” a Korean slang term describing someone overly opinionated or preachy.

Yet his interference never feels controlling. He does not try to force others into his worldview. Instead, he recognizes possibilities inside people before they can see those possibilities themselves. His so-called “kkondae” tendencies come not from authority but from an inability to stop caring.

Interestingly, the musical also turns the idea of “kkondae” back toward younger generations. Deok-chul jokingly teases Chae-rok with expressions like “young kkondae,” suggesting that self-righteousness is not really about age at all. In that sense, the musical treats “kkondae-ness” less as a generational flaw and more as a human tendency to define and limit other people’s lives.

Still, some parts of the dramatic conflict felt simplified. Deok-chul’s son functions almost entirely as the character opposing ballet itself. Realistically, Deok-chul is not attempting dangerous professional-level choreography. Much of his training consists of stretching, posture work, and basic movement. Yet the son reacts as though ballet itself is improper for an elderly man. Ironically, he encourages hiking instead — despite hiking arguably carrying greater physical risks for someone his age. The conflict therefore feels driven less by medical concern than by discomfort with social expectations and masculine aging.

Chae-rok’s backstory also leans heavily into symbolism rather than realism. A Lausanne-winning dancer would realistically still have many opportunities within the ballet world, even after injury. But the musical intentionally isolates him emotionally and economically because he represents lost youth and abandoned dreams. In that sense, Navillera functions less as a realistic ballet drama and more as a modern fable about two damaged people restoring movement to each other’s lives.

The staging supported that emotional structure beautifully. Rather than relying on massive realistic sets, the production used moving box structures, rear LED screens, projections, and lighting to fluidly transform spaces between city streets, rehearsal rooms, memory, and fantasy. The world constantly shifted between reality and Deok-chul’s inner emotional landscape.

One of the most memorable sequences was the Boléro ensemble scene expressing Chae-rok’s lost dreams. As the corps dancers performed together, Chae-rok gradually moved among them, almost involuntarily returning to the choreography. The scene revealed that ballet had already become inseparable from his body itself. Even when he claimed to hate ballet, his body still remembered it.

Lee Jae-hwan (Ken of VIXX), who played Chae-rok, approached the role less like a strict classical ballerino and more through a hybrid physical language combining musical theatre movement, contemporary dance, and emotional physicality. In some ways, that felt perfectly suited to the production. Navillera is not truly a ballet showcase; it is a story about people longing for ballet.

Meanwhile, the ensemble dancers and the actor playing Sung-cheol brought a stronger classical ballet foundation to the stage, particularly in posture, balance, and line. Their presence grounded the production whenever larger ensemble scenes appeared.

What moved me most, however, was the musical’s treatment of dementia itself. The illness is never used merely as a manipulative device for tears. Memory fades, language disappears, relationships blur — yet the body continues remembering music and movement. When Deok-chul, barely recognizing anyone anymore, instinctively begins moving backstage before the performance, the moment becomes devastating precisely because it does not feel miraculous. It feels human.

In the final scene, Deok-chul dances freely one last time before quietly walking toward the back of the stage and disappearing into darkness.

It did not feel like a tragic death scene.

It felt like a man who had fully lived his own life finally taking a gentle bow before leaving the stage.

Until the very end, Shim Deok-chul remained not simply someone’s sacrificial father, but a complete human being named Shim Deok-chul.