SYNOPSIS

In 1969, on the day Apollo 11 launches, nineteen-year-old Jungbun dreams of going to the Moon. Namwon, also nineteen and the best tailor in town, lodges in her family’s home. He buys a secondhand radio and raises its antenna to catch an English broadcast. Together they hear the words “We choose to go to the Moon.” Filled with hope, they talk about their dreams, believing they can choose their own lives. Jungbun wants to work at NASA, and Namwon is waiting to hear from a fashion school. When his acceptance letter finally arrives, they decide to leave for Seoul together the next day. That night, alone in the yard, Namwon listens to the radio and gazes at the Moon. It grows larger and larger, and he faints.

Namwon wakes in 2020 to find an elderly woman named Sunhee beside him. She calls him “my dear” and tells him they are both seventy. He cannot accept that he has grown old, let alone married her. He hurries to the train station to look for Jungbun, but when he sees his reflection as an old man, he reasons that if people can travel to the Moon, time travel must be possible too. He sets out to find a way back to 1969.

Sunhee shows him a video of his seventieth birthday. When Namwon asks whether their children or grandchildren could help him, Sunhee tells him they never had children. He insists he will go back, marry Jungbun, and raise a family. Sunhee explains that changing the past would create a time paradox and is scientifically impossible. Undeterred, Namwon decides to scout the future for useful knowledge and a chance to get rich.

Convinced that the radio and a spaceship’s energy caused his time travel, Namwon searches for the radio but finds only a pile of clothes. Sunhee explains that he collected them while studying fashion. In his workshop he finds a telescope and learns that he spent his life repairing clothes rather than becoming a fashion designer. He asks whether he may take the telescope back to Jungbun. Later, Sunhee quietly repairs the broken radio with her own tools. Unaware of what she has done, Namwon rejoices, believing the moment for his return has come.

Jungbun had always loved stories about the Moon and space. She once cut a picture of a cupcake out of Life magazine and imagined how it tasted, and Namwon wishes he could buy her a real one. He tries one way after another to faint and return to the past, but nothing works. Sunhee tells him that just as his acceptance letter arrived late, his chance may still come. He is startled that she knows this secret. In a room he has never entered, he finds faded photographs of himself and Jungbun when they were young, alongside pictures of himself and Sunhee in old age, and he is bewildered.

As Namwon begins to lose his memory, Sunhee wonders whether he might live on in the time he misses most. Then Namwon remembers the station in 1969. Jungbun had told him she could not leave: her father had been injured, and she had to stay and care for him. Namwon did not board the train to Seoul. He went back to Jungbun, choosing her as his Moon, and suggested they think of their home as a small Moon of their own.

They imagined the water by the well in the yard as water seen from the Moon and their room as a lunar base, and the Moon in the distance became a blue Earth. Gazing at the dayflower in the yard, they recalled its name, “Sunny.” Jungbun said they would stay together until they grew old. She would call Namwon “my dear,” and she asked him to call her Sunhee, a name inspired by “Sunny” that carried her wish for many bright and joyful days.

Sitting on the wooden platform in the yard, Namwon at last recognizes Sunhee. He regrets that he did not know her even though she looked the same. Gazing at the face he had longed to see all his life, he calls her “Sunhee.” She answers, “Namwon—no, my dear.” They have found each other again. Together they had made a small Moon of their own and lived there for fifty years.


REVIEW

I liked the production overall. The musical builds an emotional story through a series of small events. It does not waste time explaining every situation or rely on forced plot twists or excessive emotion. Time travel is an unrealistic premise, but the story itself is about ordinary lives that could easily have been real.

The set design was also good. Some of the set pieces were quite large, but the actors moved many of them themselves. As Namwon's memories returned, the wooden porch and rooms entered the stage one by one, gradually forming a house. Interestingly, these pieces remained at the center of the stage until the end. The house from his memories slowly took shape and eventually gained a different meaning. The scene where the house became a lunar base was beautiful, as was the distant Moon appearing like a blue Earth.

Sunhee's costume looked rather funny. Her gray hair was parted down the middle and pulled back into a bun. She wore plain, loose floral-free work pants in the old mompe style. I could not help laughing at the idea of a seventy-year-old woman dressing like that today. A short, tightly permed hairstyle might have looked more natural. The costume seemed to rely on an outdated image of an elderly woman.

Despite this styling, Kim Ji-hyun, who played Sunhee, looked beautiful. Her pastel shirt and vest even gave her a stylish appearance. When she put on her reading glasses and explained the time paradox, she showed that Sunhee still had a good knowledge of NASA, the Moon, and science. She was also cool and independent. I thought she was a rather impressive older woman.

The older Namwon walked with a bent back. People age differently, but seventy seemed a little young for such a pronounced stoop. Then again, he had spent his life bending over a sewing machine to repair clothes, so it seemed possible. In the scenes of his seventieth birthday party and selling clothes at the market, he was a charming and rather cute old man.

The songs were not overly sentimental, and the reprises were used well. The same melody could create laughter early in the show and a very different emotion later. Even after a single viewing, I could remember several songs by the end. The music was lively and well structured, and the way the songs carried the story often made me laugh. The arrangement of four actors moving between two periods also worked well.

I think a musical that leaves a clear musical memory after just one viewing has achieved something important. Such shows often become major successes. Recently, I have seen many musicals on Broadway, in the West End, and in both large theaters and small Daehangno venues in Korea. From my experience, fewer than ten percent have songs that immediately catch my attention. In some productions, listening to the songs almost feels like work. By contrast, Let Me Fly had many songs that caught my ear on first hearing. Several stayed in my memory after the performance. That alone is a good reason to praise the score.

The story was also well constructed. Namwon's memory stops at the time when he shared the news of his acceptance into the International Fashion School with Jungbun. They were looking at the Moon and dreaming about their future. After losing consciousness, he wakes in 2020. He is shocked to find that he is seventy years old and has been married to Sunhee, an elderly woman he does not recognize. He tries to return to the past and find Jungbun.

What interested me was his reaction to the life he had apparently lived. Later, he struggles to accept that he never became a fashion designer and spent his life repairing clothes. Yet at first, he shows little regret about not attending the school that accepted him. He is far more disturbed by Jungbun's absence. When he finds a telescope in his workshop, he wants to take it back to her. He also still wants to buy a real cupcake for Jungbun, who once cut a picture of one from Life magazine and could only imagine its taste.

Namwon does not simply want to return to the moment when he received his acceptance letter. He wants to return to the time he remembers spending with Jungbun. He cannot recognize Sunhee or accept his own aging. He examines objects around the house and pieces of his old memories, trying to understand what happened to him.

For Namwon, this is a time-travel story. For Sunhee, it is a story about a husband who is becoming a stranger to her. Young Namwon believes he has traveled into the future and struggles to return to the past. Sunhee watches him. Two actors play Namwon at different ages, allowing the two periods to exist together onstage. The contrast between their views of the same situation creates both humor and sadness.

Sunhee does not simply try to stop Namwon or convince him to abandon his plan. Sometimes she responds to his strange ideas. At other times, she carefully mentions things that only she knows. As their conversations continue, small remarks and ordinary objects begin to take on different meanings.

The repeated line "We choose to go to the Moon" comes from President John F. Kennedy's 1962 speech. In 1969, as Apollo 11 heads toward the Moon, Namwon and Jungbun hear these words and feel hopeful about choosing their own futures. The original statement was about America's goal in space exploration. In the musical, it takes on a broader meaning about ordinary people making choices in their own lives.

Namwon dreams of becoming a fashion designer, while Jungbun dreams of NASA and the Moon. Their ambitions are considerable for their time and circumstances. But the future imagined at nineteen does not necessarily match the life lived at seventy. The musical made me consider whether a life should be called a failure simply because a person did not follow the path they once dreamed of.

A single decision at nineteen does not determine an entire life at seventy. The musical shows almost nothing of the fifty years between 1969 and 2020. It does not explain in detail what happened during those years or what choices the characters made along the way. Yet this omission feels like an open space rather than a gap in the story. A person's life is not shaped by one decision alone, but by countless choices made over many years.

Namwon's life as a tailor might seem modest compared with his youthful ambition. But a person's happiness cannot be measured only by occupation or professional success. The musical asks us to consider not just the dreams he failed to achieve, but also the years he lived and what mattered to him during that time.

The story begins on the night Apollo 11 heads toward the Moon. It gradually shifts its focus to the small space where the characters live. Humanity's great leap and an ordinary person's life come together through the image of the Moon. Familiar places such as a yard, a well, a room, and a wooden porch can become entirely different worlds depending on how they are seen.

The porch and rooms that remain at the center of the stage until the end are also meaningful. At first, they seem to represent places from Namwon's memories. As the story continues, they become more than reminders of the past. The story of people looking toward the distant Moon eventually returns to the place where they have lived their lives.

Let Me Fly does not judge its characters by whether they achieved their dreams. Instead, it asks us to think about how they lived the lives they chose. It creates humor and emotion without major dramatic events and conveys the weight of passing years without excessive sentimentality. The music, staging, and storytelling worked very well together.