SYNOPSIS

In the spring of 1984, Myung-woo is a second-year high school student. He takes part in an outdoor sketching contest at Deoksugung Palace. There he meets Su-a, a third-year student who is one year older. He falls for her at once. He leaves behind a portrait of a woman turning away. It appears to be a drawing of Su-a, but he refuses to show it to her.

Su-a enters university in 1985. She joins the student movement and is arrested. Myung-woo writes poetry and wants a quiet life. He is afraid and tries to stop her. Their views begin to divide them.

Myung-woo enters university the following year. He receives his draft notice and joins the military. He is assigned to the riot police. Around 1987, when the pro-democracy movement grows stronger, he is sent to suppress protests. This places him on the opposite side from Su-a. When he returns on his first leave, Su-a ends their relationship. She thinks that staying with her will only bring him hardship.

From this point, Myung-woo’s memories begin to change. In his memory, he meets Su-a again in a makgeolli bar at night, but she soon leaves. Makgeolli is a Korean milky rice wine. He also runs into her on a subway train passing City Hall Station in 2002, on the day of South Korea’s World Cup match against Portugal.

In reality, Myung-woo grows close to his junior Si-young after his breakup with Su-a. They fall in love and marry. Su-a marries Jung-gon, a senior fellow activist who went through the movement and the death of a friend with her.

Si-young is hurt that the places she shared with Myung-woo rarely appear in his songs. He becomes a composer and lyricist. He continues to write about City Hall, Gwanghwamun, Jeongdong-gil, and Deoksugung Palace. These places belong to his memories of Su-a. His first love remains lodged in his mind like a shard of glass. Si-young still marries him, telling him that she will hold this against him for the rest of their lives.

More than thirty years later, Myung-woo happens to meet Su-a and Jung-gon in Gwanghwamun. Jung-gon is embarrassed to admit that he now sells American cars. As a student, he used to chant, “Yankee, go home.” Su-a tells Myung-woo that she enjoys listening to his songs.

But Myung-woo did not meet Su-a several times after their breakup. They parted on a pedestrian overpass and did not see each other again until their first reunion thirty years later. The meetings in the makgeolli bar and at City Hall Station in 2002 were invented memories. Myung-woo created and colored them for his songs.

In the final moments of his life, Myung-woo meets Wol-ha. Wol-ha governs fate and human bonds. He guides Myung-woo through his “empty house of memory.” Beautiful memories can remain, but distorted ones must be corrected.

When Myung-woo learns that he has only fifteen seconds left, he goes to Si-young instead of Su-a. They revisit their memories by the Han River. The portrait of the woman turning away was not a drawing of Su-a. It showed Si-young, upset because her husband kept thinking about another woman.

Myung-woo finally realizes that Si-young was the most important person in his life. He is now ready to leave. In the final scene, Myung-woo departs with Wol-ha on the upper level of the stage. Below them, Si-young weeps over his death.


REVIEW

A jukebox musical benefits from a character who explains the story and links the scenes. Within the story, Wol-ha stands between life and death. Between the stage and the audience, he works as an arbiter and host. He sets up each scene and introduces the next one like an emcee. He can break the fourth wall and bring on the ensemble for group songs and dances. The audience can still follow the story.

Lee Young-hoon’s songs are full of love, memory, and longing. They fit this plot well. Many of them are also bright and rhythmic. They can quickly change the mood. In Gwanghwamun Love Song, Wol-ha and the ensemble often turn familiar songs into direct performances for the audience. The production makes full use of the jukebox format. It relies less on large stage machinery and more on group singing, dancing, and the feelings created by the music.

Lee Young-hoon’s songs are familiar to Korean audiences and often carry a sense of loss. It is therefore easy to expect a sad story about an unfulfilled love. It is also understandable that a story about university students in the 1980s would use the pro-democracy movement as an obstacle to that love. When Su-a joined the student movement, I hoped the musical would handle the story carefully. It had entered territory that was too serious to use only as convenient plot material.

Myung-woo has one minute left to live when he meets Wol-ha and the “Geudaedeul,” meaning “you all.” Before he leaves this world, they help him correct his memories. They follow him through his past and help him review his life.

Instead of thinking first about his wife of more than thirty years, Myung-woo remembers Su-a, his high school love. Time moves slowly between life and death. Over forty-five seconds, he revisits their first meeting, when he secretly drew her. He remembers playing the guitar and writing poetry during their time together. He remembers Su-a joining the student movement. He remembers being assigned to the riot police and being forced to suppress the protesters on her side. He also remembers their breakup and what seem to be several chance meetings later in life.

His memories of Si-young also appear. Myung-woo loved her and married her. Yet his songs are filled with Gwanghwamun, Jeongdong-gil, and Deoksugung Palace, all places linked to Su-a rather than Si-young. Si-young watches her husband write songs about another woman. She feels jealous and hurt.

Most Korean audience members will know these songs. Singers from several generations have recorded new versions of them. They do not belong to only one age group. Their familiarity delivers the emotion of each scene at once. This makes it easy to enter the story.

Enoch was natural and funny as Wol-ha, and he sang well. His voice remained full and carried clearly even when he sang with the ensemble. His dancing also looked natural. He had the showmanship needed for a character who speaks directly to the audience and controls the action.

Lee Seok-hoon has a clear singing style of his own. His voice is beautiful when he sings with SG WANNABE. In some other musicals, however, his pop style has made me see Lee Seok-hoon before I see the character. It was not necessarily bad, but the singer sometimes remained more visible than the role.

That style suited Myung-woo very well. Lee Seok-hoon’s voice seemed to merge with a character who is both a composer and a lyricist. It was a surprising match. He also looked right for the role without his usual glasses. As Enoch joked, people almost failed to recognize him without them.

Near the end, Lee Seok-hoon seemed to be genuinely crying. Myung-woo appears to die at a fairly young age, but the musical never explains his illness or the cause of his death. Not every detail needs an answer. Still, I thought an American or British musical might have tried to tie up this loose end. I then wondered whether a Korean jukebox musical already faces a larger barrier abroad. International audiences do not know the original songs.

Park Hee-jun was fresh and lively as the young Myung-woo. He sang and danced well. When the older and younger Myung-woo sang together, Park seemed to take the higher part. He reached the notes with ease.

Lee Eun-jung had a light, textured voice that sounded like that of a ballad singer. The choreography in the student protest scenes was intense, but she also handled the dancing well. Kim Min-su gave a steady performance as Jung-gon.

The older Su-a had limited stage time. Sunye sang with ease. She is also a strong dancer, so it was disappointing that the role gave her little chance to show it.

The dialogue spoken by the Geudaedeul was difficult to hear because of the strong echo. I could follow the familiar songs because I already knew them. Even so, the heavy reverberation sometimes blurred the lyrics.

The set was built around a three-level steel frame that looked like a temporary structure. Several screens moved separately like sliding doors, with images projected onto them. An LED screen stood at the rear. The overall set was simple.

The costumes created a uniform visual style. Wol-ha and Myung-woo wore long white coats. Except when they appeared as student activists or riot police, the ensemble wore white clothes that resembled cafeteria work uniforms.

The familiar songs, the performers, and the shows led by Wol-ha and the ensemble filled the simple stage. I enjoyed following the performance. Yet I kept wondering how the musical would resolve the history it had brought into the story.

The final revelation gives the story a clear center. Myung-woo believed that he had met Su-a many times after their breakup. In fact, he had created those encounters while writing his songs. He also believed that the portrait showed Su-a. It actually showed his wife.

Only at the end of his life does Myung-woo turn away from his romanticized first love. He returns to Si-young, the woman who shared his real life. The story of love and memory reaches a full conclusion.

The story of the pro-democracy movement does not.

Su-a is arrested. Myung-woo joins the riot police and suppresses protesters. Su-a and Jung-gon also experience the death of a friend from their movement. Once a musical places lives at risk onstage, it should at least show what those people fought for. It should also show what the death left behind in those who survived.

This does not mean that every later part of their lives needs an explanation. But the musical uses death to raise the stakes. It should not leave that death as little more than a wound from youth or an event that changes a romantic relationship.

People who joined the student movement later took many different paths. Some continued in the labor movement. Some moved into charitable work. Others entered politics. Some left the past behind and lived ordinary lives. Others may have remained trapped in their old ideas.

Su-a and Jung-gon’s becoming ordinary working adults is not in itself a betrayal of their beliefs. Nor is Jung-gon’s job selling American cars necessarily inconsistent with the anti-American slogans of his youth.

The musical gives little meaning to the thirty years between those two lives. Instead, it turns Jung-gon’s old cry of “Yankee, go home” and his current job selling American cars into an embarrassed joke. This makes the convictions of his youth seem like youthful recklessness. The joke covers the complexity of his later life instead of exploring it.

The older Jung-gon’s main line comes when he tells Myung-woo that he may see Su-a from time to time: “Thoughts do not disappear just because you suppress them.” The line seems to sum up the musical’s theme that memories and thoughts cannot simply be pushed away. Jung-gon may have noticed that the references to Gwanghwamun and Jeongdong-gil in Myung-woo’s lyrics reveal his continued longing for Su-a, Jung-gon’s wife. However, the musical gives too little sense of Jung-gon’s life and beliefs thirty years later. The line does not connect naturally with the young man he once was. Instead, it raises new questions about him near the end of the musical.

I felt that Jung-gon needed a line connecting the responsibilities of his youth and middle age. It could have shown that his sense of duty had moved from society to his family. It could have shown that he understood Myung-woo, who had also been caught in the times as a conscripted riot police officer. It could also have shown that his beliefs remained intact, even though he now lived an ordinary working life. Many variations were possible. Any one of them could have kept Jung-gon from becoming the subject of a joke that suggests betrayal. He could instead have remained a man who carried the beliefs of his youth into a different form of responsibility.

This point extends beyond the specific history of South Korea’s pro-democracy movement. The raw and sometimes reckless convictions of youth give society energy and necessary tension. When those convictions later turn toward family and the responsibilities of daily life, the change may be healthy growth rather than betrayal. Jung-gon was well placed to embody this universal form of maturity. It remains bitter that the musical turns the missing connection into a joke without giving him even one line to make it.

There is a further irony. The musical’s dramatic method resembles the flaw that its own final revelation exposes.

Myung-woo remakes his relationship with Su-a as a beautiful memory for his songs. The musical does something similar. It uses the political lives of Su-a, Jung-gon, and their dead friend as material for Myung-woo’s first love and his final return to Si-young. The story corrects Myung-woo for remembering Su-a’s life in a self-centered way. Yet it also turns Su-a’s life and the pro-democracy movement into tools for Myung-woo’s growth.

The student movement of that period included several ideological groups. These included NL, or National Liberation, and PD, or People’s Democracy. Anti-American, national autonomy, and reunification slogans were used especially by the NL movement. Such slogans were therefore possible at the time.

However, the musical does not identify Su-a and Jung-gon with any particular movement. It repeats these slogans as if they represented the pro-democracy movement of the 1980s as a whole. If the aim was to show the broader movement, “End the constitutional freeze,” a demand to allow direct presidential elections through constitutional reform, and “Down with dictatorship” would have been more representative slogans.

A jukebox musical does not need to explain history like a documentary. But politics, history, and science should not be used only as easy devices for conflict and tragedy. Simplifying facts is not the same as creating convincing fiction. Expert review should not be a final step used to add more explanation. It should identify problems during development, before they become fixed in the dramaturgy.

CJ ENM was not only an outside investor in a finished work. It developed and staged this version. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, national sensitivities around history and political interests have sharpened. International audiences also do not share the same knowledge of modern Korean history as Korean audiences.

In this context, repeated anti-American slogans from one faction within the student movement may create an extra burden for overseas partners when no explanation is provided. CJ ENM had another chance to review the work for this revival, but left the issue unchanged.

By combining the pro-democracy movement with Lee Young-hoon’s songs, Gwanghwamun Love Song created narrative consequences that it needed to carry to the end. The musical closes Myung-woo’s story of love and memory. It does not fully resolve the weight of the history used to reach that ending.

Choosing a powerful subject is not the same as carrying its weight.