Word: seoul
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Musical theater has a long history of successful productions that at first glance don't seem particularly fun or uplifting?consider Oliver!'s homeless orphans in Dickensian London, or The Sound of Music's Von Trapp family harmonizing its way out of Nazi-occupied Austria. But in Seoul, novice theater director Jung Sung San is pushing the concept of the unlikely musical to a new extreme. Jung, 36, currently has a cast in rehearsal for a musical about the prison camps of North Korea...
...estimated 20,000 prisoners, including many jailed for what Pyongyang deems political crimes. If you've heard of Yodok, that's because it has already gained a good deal of international infamy. One of Yodok's former inmates, Kang Chol Hwan, a North Korean defector now living in Seoul, wrote a harrowing memoir (The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag) about his imprisonment there as a young boy. The book was translated into English, and Kang ended up in Washington last year chatting about his incarceration with an unexpected soul mate: U.S. President George W. Bush...
...There's no shortage of literature about gulag life, of course. But a musical? A rehearsal in Seoul earlier this month confirmed suspicions that Jung, who defected to South Korea from the North in 1994, is not looking to delight audiences with the kind of toe-tapping jollity dished up on Broadway: while a patriotic North Korean song blared in the background, a dozen actors playing prison guards marched menacingly in goosestep around three Yodok inmates caught trying to escape. Jung, who says his father was publicly executed in one of Kim's camps, intends to play things straight...
...Pressure or no pressure, Yodok will open in Seoul in mid-March, Jung says, adding that he expects it to be a commercial success: "I believe South Koreans do care and are interested in prison camps." So optimistic is he, in fact, that Yodok, the musical, is the first part of a planned trilogy. And after that, who knows: perhaps a song-and-dance version of the six-party talks...
...Numbers 48% Proportion of South Korea's youth that would support North Korea if the U.S. attacked it without Seoul's consent, according to a recent poll 12% Proportion who said they would back...