SYNOPSIS

In 2014, an older Dong-ho is searching for his sister Song-hwa. Having spent nearly half of his life wandering across the country in search of her, he recalls the past.

In the 1960s, his mother works the fields to make a living, tying the young Dong-ho to a post at the edge of the field so she would not lose him. At times he is left in the cold or under the blazing sun, but Dong-ho feels happy simply being with his mother. She later meets the pansori singer Yu-bong, remarries him, and dies while giving birth. Dong-ho comes to believe that Yu-bong caused his mother’s death, and he grows to hate him.

On the day they first meet, Yu-bong introduces Song-hwa as Dong-ho’s older sister, though they are not related by blood. The two children grow up trusting and relying on each other. Yu-bong teaches them pansori, urging them to draw the sound up from deep within and to sing with han (a deep, internalized sorrow shaped by loss and endurance, not resolved but held through acceptance).

One day, passing by a performance, Dong-ho sees the band Spring Boys singing “Proud Mary.” The group tours nationwide and performs for U.S. troops in Korea, and he is instantly captivated.

Yu-bong becomes furious, saying that Song-hwa will be the one to sing and ordering Dong-ho to take up the drum. Dong-ho has a major argument with him. Dejected, missing his mother and resenting Yu-bong, Dong-ho is approached by Song-hwa, who says she will show him how to sing in a low register and turns his anger toward their father into song. Saying she will take the role of Mong-ryong, she tells Dong-ho he is as pretty as Chunhyang and invites him to sing the love song together. Following her lead, Dong-ho takes the female part of Chunhyang, and the two of them laugh.

While searching for places to perform, Yu-bong encounters a master pansori singer with whom he once studied, now performing changgeuk. He criticizes it as a jumble of pansori, popular songs, and Western music, and insists that only by completing a full-length pansori performance can one become a true singer. The master singer responds with sarcasm, saying that Yu-bong, who could have become famous, instead betrayed his teacher and left in pursuit of nothing but sound itself.

Dong-ho eventually seeks out Spring Boys in response to their audition notice for a new member. After singing a pansori passage with clarity and force, he is asked if he can sing Western songs; he sings “In Your Eyes” and moves them deeply.

As he leaves, Dong-ho asks Song-hwa to come with him, but she chooses to remain by her father’s side and lets him go.

Yu-bong believes that the loss of Dong-ho will accumulate as han within Song-hwa and deepen her voice. He teaches her not to sing in the Dongpyeonje style, which bursts outward as if expelling the sound, but to produce the Seopyeonje sound, forged within and drawn up from inside.

Song-hwa wanders with Yu-bong and remarks that it feels strange to walk as two along the road that the three of them once walked together. One day, as she lies exhausted and asleep, Yu-bong places a long cloth soaked in poison over her eyes, taking away her sight. When she awakens, she cries out for her father and screams that she cannot see. From then on, she begins to sing by drawing her voice up from deep within. Yu-bong is moved, believing that her sound is finally ripening, but Song-hwa falls into despair and begs him to kill her instead.

Spring Boys perform “Unchain My Heart,” and Dong-ho receives enthusiastic applause. He goes on to achieve great success with his own rock compositions.

As the environment changes and there are fewer places to perform pansori, Yu-bong takes Song-hwa to a changgeuk troupe and has her sing for them. Her voice, now carrying han, moves them deeply, but she is not accepted. Witnessing this, Dong-ho realizes that his sister has lost her sight. He pushes Yu-bong aside and urges Song-hwa to leave with him, but she refuses, saying that both her choice to continue singing and her decision to remain and forgive her father are her own.

Dong-ho has long hated Yu-bong for singing all day while his mother was dying, but Song-hwa tells Yu-bong that, at the moment of her death, Dong-ho’s mother had asked him to sing her to the other side, and that he had been following her wish. She also comes to understand that Yu-bong did not tell Dong-ho the truth, hoping that Dong-ho’s hatred would turn into han and lead him to his own voice.

Yu-bong, for his part, longs deeply for Dong-ho, even memorizing and singing his rock songs. He says that just as his wife came to him drawn by his sound, Dong-ho too will one day return, drawn by his sister’s voice.

Tormented by his longing for his sister and unable to act on it, Dong-ho falls into despair. At a colleague’s suggestion, he uses marijuana, is arrested, and is sentenced to one year in prison.

Song-hwa and Yu-bong continue to wander and sing, but Yu-bong grows old and collapses by the roadside. Looking back on his life, he meets his death, facing the white funeral bier where Dong-ho’s mother awaits.

After his release, Dong-ho makes a brilliant comeback, becoming the head of Spring Company and winning a Producer of the Year award. Yet he remains empty inside and begins in earnest to search for Song-hwa. Song-hwa, even when staying in a village, asks people to say that she has already left, believing that she would only become a burden to him, and continues to wander and sing. Her voice gradually becomes legendary. Dong-ho follows her, but each time he arrives just too late.

In 2014, hearing that she has been seen at the far end of Jeollanam-do, Dong-ho rushes there at once. Song-hwa greets him, saying that every singer carries a story. Dong-ho begins to speak of the father he believes drove his mother to death, but he swallows the fact that they recognize each other, and they do not say it aloud.

As Song-hwa reaches for the drum to begin, Dong-ho takes it from her and strikes the rim to mark the start. Song-hwa sings the scene from Simcheongga in which Sim Bongsa, Simcheong’s father, regains his sight, and with Dong-ho’s drumming and chuimsae (vocal interjections), the performance continues. The musical comes to a close.


REVIEW

I have recently begun to watch several changgeuk productions, but this was my first time seeing a musical centered on pansori. Having been familiar with the voices of the soriggun (소리꾼) Lee Jaram and Kim Jun-su, my expectations were high.

The musical adopts a framed narrative structure. Scenes of young Song-hwa and Dong-ho are interwoven with those of Dong-ho in his old age in 2014, and these shifts occur quite frequently. While this kind of temporal layering is not unfamiliar, the repeated transitions make the past and present feel less like separate timelines and more like overlapping emotional layering.

From a staging perspective, there are no blackouts at all. Scene transitions are achieved through scrims, a revolving stage, and projections. At first, the transitions felt swift and fluid. However, as the performance progressed, the repeated movement of tall vertical scrims that divided the space began to feel somewhat excessive. Despite the minimalistic set, the stage gradually appeared visually cluttered. Actors often disappeared behind the scrim and reappeared, or exited as the scrim shifted sideways, effectively omitting transitional movement. The layered silhouettes of mountains in the background formed another key visual element. Aside from these, the stage remained restrained, with only a low platform moving as a primary set piece.

Musically, the most striking difference lay in Song-hwa’s voice. Lee Jaram’s chang differed from the pansori style I had heard in traditional changgeuk. Her tone was thinner and smoother. Considering the scene in which Yu-bong describes Dong-ho’s explosive singing as Dongpyeonje, it seemed that Seopyeonje favors a more internalized sound. In the first act, her voice stays fairly clear, but it only gains real depth later when she moves into a lower register known as haseong. Kim Jun-su, who plays Dong-ho, also possesses a strong voice, which made Yu-bong’s criticism of him somewhat ironic. Even when he attempted to sing roughly, it was difficult to conceal his underlying vocal ability.

The musical numbers form a composite of different genres. Songs such as “살다 보면 (lit. As Life Goes On)” feel familiar and comforting, yet closer to televised concert programs than to typical musical theatre numbers. Alongside these are pop and rock songs such as “Proud Mary,” “Unchain My Heart,” and “In Your Eyes,” which further emphasize the hybrid nature of the score. Song-hwa and Yu-bong remain rooted in pansori, Dong-ho moves between styles, and the ensemble combines elements of pansori with conventional musical theatre.

The orchestra was generally clear, but the final scene left some questions. As Song-hwa sings a passage from Simcheongga, Dong-ho accompanies her on the drum, while a piano line enters. Initially, the piano felt out of place, and the lack of rhythmic alignment made it sound almost like noise. As the orchestra gradually builds and Song-hwa’s voice recedes, the musical comes to a close. One wonders whether a traditional wind instrument such as daegeum or taepyeongso, or even a flute or oboe following the melodic line before expanding into the orchestra, might have created a more organic transition.

At its core, the narrative revolves around emotional structure. Song-hwa’s transformation does not begin with her blindness; it begins earlier. The moment Dong-ho leaves, her internal world has already begun to collapse. The loss of the only relationship that sustained her prevents her emotions from moving outward, causing them instead to accumulate within. This condition resembles what might be called han.

For dramatic effect, however, the quiet, inward accumulation of han is replaced by the act of blinding. This choice appears to emphasize a moment of sudden rupture rather than a gradual build-up of emotion.

Han may be understood as a state in which deep loss or pain accumulates without resolution, moving beyond outward expressions such as resentment or anger into an internalized mode of endurance. Although often described as a uniquely Korean collective emotion, it may in fact represent a more universal human condition, one that has simply been given a distinct name in Korea. In this sense, the life of Sarah in Ragtime can also be read as embodying a form of han.

Yu-bong deliberately attempts to transform these emotions—from resentment into han. He even commits the extreme act of blinding Song-hwa in order to intensify and accelerate this process. Yet Song-hwa does not appear to be merely shaped by this imposition. Rather, she seems to accept and pursue it even further. The loss of a loved one is not as immediate as physical injury, but it operates more slowly and deeply. Emotions that remain unresolved accumulate internally, and this prolonged state can feel even more cruel. In this sense, the act of blinding functions less as a turning point than as an acceleration of a process already underway. It is possible that Song-hwa would have moved in the same direction even without it.

Yu-bong, too, resists simple interpretation. He is a figure who relentlessly imposes han, yet he also loves his wife and longs for Dong-ho, even memorizing and singing his songs. He conceals the truth from Dong-ho in the hope that his hatred will eventually transform into han and lead him to discover his own voice. Is he an artist who sacrificed human relationships for the sake of artistic perfection, or a man who used art to justify his own choices?

At one point, Yu-bong dismisses changgeuk as a “jumble,” criticizing the mixture of pansori, popular music, and Western forms. That word lingers. Because the musical itself is constructed from precisely such a mixture—pansori, popular song, rock, and ballad. In that sense, “jumble” ceases to be merely a line of dialogue and becomes a question directed back at the work itself. The form creates tension and perhaps even confusion, yet it may also be the very force that allows performance to evolve.

Lee Jaram’s portrayal of Song-hwa begins relatively lightly in the first act, but in the final Simcheongga passage, her voice carries a deep resonance of internalized han without overt force. It feels like a culmination of the Seopyeonje vocal style.

Having previously seen Kim Jun-su perform Sim Bongsa in a changgeuk production of Simcheong, I found myself wanting to hear more of his pansori when he played the drum and added chuimsae (vocal interjections). His brief pansori segment in the audition scene naturally drew strong audience response, and his acting remained steady throughout.

Park Ho-san’s Yu-bong was also striking. Known for his acting, he further elevated the production by convincingly handling the vocal demands of the role.

Even now, the act of blinding Song-hwa remains deeply unsettling. And yet, paradoxically, it is precisely the “jumble” that Yu-bong rejects that may serve as the driving force behind the evolution of performance itself.