KPOP The Musical music plays.
Joe Skinner: If you’re hearing this song – it might sound like you’re at a club, or at a concert. But where you’d really have heard it is on Broadway in KPOP The Musical. KPOP The Musical is based on the lives of Korean pop bands and the industry behind them. The world of K-pop is known for its rigorous and almost factory-like labels, whose artists, called “idols,” live in dorms together to train for life on stage. K-pop labels have built some of the world’s biggest bands, like BTS.
Clip from BTS’ “DNA.”
Joe Skinner: BLACKPINK.
Clip from BLACKPINK’s “BOOMBAYAH.”
Joe Skinner: And SEVENTEEN.
Clip from SEVENTEEN’s “HOT.”
Joe Skinner: And their fanbases are some of the world’s most devoted – the BTS fanbase, which calls itself Army, hosts its own conventions dedicated to the band.
2018 Billboard Awards: Are there any BTS fans here? [screaming]
Joe Skinner: But the lives of kpop idols are notoriously private. What they share is tightly controlled by their labels. The idols are a precious export, and their image is everything. Growing up listening to K-pop, writer Jason Kim spent years wondering what it’s like to be a K-pop star. He wanted to bring that question to life on the Broadway stage.
Jason Kim: I still have that question, even after working on this for almost 10 years. I don’t understand how somebody who has hundreds of millions of followers, who’s every move is analyzed by the fandom, how they live.
Joe Skinner: I’m Joe Skinner, and this is American Masters: Creative Spark. In each episode, we bring you the story of how artists bring their creative work to life. For today’s episode, Jason Kim breaks down the process and inspiration behind KPOP The Musical.
Jason Kim: I always had a love for performance because I grew up in Seoul in a small little apartment, where my grandma raised me. And my grandma was born in 1916. So she just comes from a different world. I think the way that she kept herself entertained and occupied, especially during the war, was to tell stories and to kind of perform them. And when she was raising me in the eighties and nineties, she did that for me, and I thought that that was totally normal for a child to have your grandparent performing for you. So I became interested in theater because I think she planted that seed.
Joe Skinner: When Jason was 10 – his family moved a world away to St. Louis, Missouri. And one of the things from Seoul that he brought with him was his love for K-pop.
Clip from fin.K.L’s “Forever Love.”
Jason Kim: And I remember wearing out the tape that I had brought of this girl band named Fin.K.L. I just kept playing that cassette tape over and over again, and really K-pop started to represent, as a kid growing up in the Midwest, this connection to my home and my culture, and I especially loved the burgeoning hip hop scene in K-pop back then. And so I was listening a lot to this band called Epik High.
Clip from Epik High’s “One.”
Jason Kim: And really taking joy in their very confessional Korean lyrics, which I missed being able to kind of communicate in growing up in the Midwest. so it always represented a sense of home for me.
Joe Skinner: Even though Jason was a creative kid who loved writing and music, he felt immense pressure from his family as a first generation American to study something like medicine, or law, or at the very least, go to business school. But at 18, Jason took off to New York to study English.
Jason Kim: I think I had this really romanticized idea of New York as most writers do at some point. I fully thought I was gonna go and just, just get off the plane and I would be Joan Didion. That didn’t happen. I was one of those people that just devoured every single piece of not only performing art, but really as much culture and art as possible. I would stand in line for three, four hours so I could go see a new production of La traviata.
Joe Skinner: Jason was enchanted by New York. But he was less enchanted by his first job out of college at The New Yorker, where he was doing research for other writers at the magazine. He was so disenchanted that he quit in the middle of the 2008 recession. He wasn’t sure what exactly he was going to do next, so he just started writing. For months, alone in his apartment, just writing for himself.
Jason Kim: And then once that happened, it all just kind of snowballed.
Joe Skinner: Those months spent writing alone gave Jason enough material to get into an MFA program. He went into it thinking he might become a playwright – 30 people come see his work in a black box, that sort of thing. But out of grad school, he was hired to write for a pretty legendary TV show at the time – Girls on HBO. The leads from Girls had read one of Jason’s plays, and hired him within the week. After Girls ended, he wrote and produced for other HBO shows like Barry and Divorce. But through all this work on TV, Jason continued to write for theater.
Joe Skinner: when you’re sitting down to write, what’s your like ritual, so to speak?
Jason Kim: Oh, I procrastinate and cry. Um, for so long I was processless, and so my days would be eaten up asking the question, how do I begin? And since then I’ve sort of ritualized writing to a point that feels repeatable but also freeing. I have this routine where I get up as early as possible and I make myself coffee and I have a moment with my dog, and then I’m at my desk as soon as possible. And the first thing I write, it’s a list of things that I can’t get out of my head, and it could be anything from, God, that pizza last night was so good, to dread about my dad being sick, to questions I might be having about one of my characters’ plot points. And so I make that list and then I meditate. After that I come out of it still with my head buzzing, and then I start to write. And I really think I only have about two to three good hours of writing max in a day, and then I do all the administrative work that’s required of being a writer, which they don’t tell you. Really you don’t realize that 90% of it is actually emails and phone calls. And I really make that separation of church and state because if I do one meeting, have one phone call, answer one email in that sort of sacred time, I can’t get back into it.
Joe Skinner: When did KPOP The Musical enter your life?
Jason Kim: 10 years ago I was in a writer’s group at a theater called Ars Nova, and I had wanted to write something, I didn’t know what, based in the world of K-pop, because I was fascinated by pop stars and the pressures that are exerted on pop stars. I’m always wondering when I go to a concert, like, what is BTS talking about as they leave the stage?
iHeart Radio interviewer: What was it that made you want to be a performer? An artist?
BTS: We have 200 reasons right in front of us! [applause]
Jason Kim: Are they fighting about something? Is there drama about something? Are they happy about something? Are they scared about something? Feeling vulnerable about something? And that’s just where my brain immediately goes – the psychology of stardom and perfection.
Joe Skinner: Luck would have it that others in that writers group – a director, and some composers – were interested in the world of K-pop as well. So they started working together to write the first version of KPOP The Musical.
Jason Kim: We all just kind of got match made and we started banging our heads against the wall and seeing what would fall out. That’s how the initial iteration of the show was born. In theater, it really looks like talking and doing exercises and meandering. You just try to go into every single corner of the subject at hand and see what you can find and see what seems interesting and see what sparks. I remember back then talking a lot about the industry as a political statement because K-pop had not yet really crossed over to the U.S. and so, what does that mean? And what does it mean in terms of the racial dynamics’ intentions and the history of race in this country? And so you bank that and then you just kind of see what starts to emerge.
Joe Skinner: What emerged from this writers group was a fully immersive musical. The theater, Ars Nova, had space for Jason Kim and the team to build a three-story K-pop factory that the audience could move through and experience the stories of the idols in the musical.
Jason Kim: At the end of it, which converged into a pretty celebratory, I would say 20-minute concert. So you would sort of learn what these pop stars have to go through and then see them on stage at the end.
Music from KPOP The Musical.
Joe Skinner: This first iteration of KPOP The Musical ran in a small off-Broadway theater in 2017. It was almost completely sold out. And it was the first of its kind – a musical with a mostly Asian creative team, focused on a style of music that had yet to really break through in the U.S. Talks of producing a full run for Broadway started right away. Although there was immediate interest in bringing KPOP The Musical to Broadway, it took another five years to make it happen. For one, the pandemic got in the way. But also – the Broadway theaters weren’t able to recreate the three-story immersive K-pop factory from the first iteration. So Jason Kim and the KPOP team had to rewrite the show for a new stage and a new audience. The second iteration of KPOP The Musical is about a fictional KPOP label called R-B-Y.
Jason Kim: It takes place on the night of a very important concert. And the show begins when its lead star, a solo female artist walks off stage and we flashback to find out why she got to that state in her life. And along the way, we see her label mates, an eight-member boy band…
Music from KPOP The Musical’s boy band.
Jason Kim: …And a five-member girl band…
Music from KPOP The Musical’s girl band.
Jason Kim: …Struggle with thematically-related conflicts that we see her going through.
Joe Skinner: The solo artist, MwE, and the bands – F8 and RTMIS – aren’t based on any specific K-pop bands or idols. But some of the cast members were idols themselves. Luna, who plays the lead, was the lead of a K-pop group called f(x). And her experiences in the industry helped shape the show.
Jason Kim: So many things were brought to my attention that I never even thought about. One of the first conversations I had with Luna was about her sense of duty and her sense of honor in representing the industry and her label and the country. And that’s just not something that you really think a pop star is thinking about. That’s not what you’re thinking when you’re watching Beyonce, I don’t think, or Adele or whatever. and it was fascinating for me to hear that.
Joe Skinner: This sense of honor for K-pop stars became a central theme in the show. Jason Kim explored how high the stakes feel for these artists by writing the musical in the style of a K-drama – basically, a Korean telenovela or soap opera.
Jason Kim: The story that we’re putting on stage is a story about people who carry a tremendous amount of pressure on their shoulders. And what’s fun about K-dramas is that every single thing, every single moment in any K-drama is like high, high, high, high stakes. And so in the show, for instance, like when the characters are talking about one person’s formation being off, I think one might say, “oh, who cares? Like this girl’s like a millimeter off her formation. Like whatever.” But in the world of the show, these characters take it so seriously that it’s almost life or death, and nailing that formation has so much subtext to it, including representing your country in the right way. And so I wanted to use the form because it lends itself to that kind of expression of everything being so intense and high stakes. And so I almost wanted to write a defense of melodrama.
Joe Skinner: This K-drama writing style also lent itself to discussing race in the framework of KPOP – it’s an idea that first struck Jason 10 years ago.
Jason Kim: There are certain K-pop bands that have various permutations depending on where they’re performing. So there could be like the Japanese version of the same band, and a Chinese version of the same band. And sometimes they swap out certain members. And so I’m really kind of fascinated by the way that race is dealt with and kind of constructed within the K-pop framework. And so I wanted to talk about it and do it in a way that felt as fun as possible. And so the eight-piece boy band that you see in the show, there is a new bandmate called Brad, and he is the half-white American addition to the band. And there is a tremendous amount of friction between him, and the leader of the band who’s very almost nationalistic and Korean. and they kind of go at each other and race becomes a big central part of it. There’s a line in there where he’s sort of, he’s sort of talking about how he never knows which side to be, which side he has to conjure, depending on the context. And to me, I thought it was an interesting way to sort of look at race like this in front of a primarily white Broadway audience.
Joe Skinner: After 10 years of writing, two iterations, and weeks of previews, the idols of KPOP The Musical took the Broadway stage for the first time in November of 2022.
Music from KPOP The Musical.
Joe Skinner: This was a huge moment for Jason and the team. KPOP The Musical was the first ever Broadway production that told a story centered on Korean experiences, with a majority of Korean talent in front of and behind the scenes. 18 performers made their Broadway debut, singing original music with both English and Korean lyrics – KPOP The Musical was truly the first of its kind. So when KPOP The Musical closed prematurely just two weeks after it opened, Jason wondered what could’ve happened if the show had more time to find its audience. An audience that traditional Broadway marketing wasn’t able to reach. The audience that did show up was dancing and screaming like they were at a real K-pop concert – exactly what he was hoping for.
Jason Kim: I really hope that they feel the level of exhilaration that I think a lot of these global superstars feel, that this kind of pop music and performance, this mode of performance, is a heavenly reach.
Joe Skinner: Although it’s a little bittersweet that the show closed early, I think Jason could always look back and reflect on this one story that he told us about his grandma when she was escaping the Korean War. It’s a story that she told him a lot when he was a kid in Seoul. For Jason, it’s a story of survival.
Jason Kim: My grandma used to tell me this story when I was four or five, about how she, as I think the oldest, if I remember correctly, member of a 14-member family, tried to get her parents to escape right before the war started in Korea. and their family owned a noodle shop in what is now the capital of North Korea in Pyongyang. My great-grandparents refused to leave because they were so attached to that shop. What my grandma did was she took her three year old and she was pregnant with my mother at the time also, and she got on a boat and she rode down the entire peninsula until she got to the very southern tip of it. This took about, I think two or three months, and she would always regale me with stories of like, “oh yeah, and then one night I was just, you know, like sleeping in the woods and I was thinking about your grandfather and where he was, and, he probably is fine as long as he has some kind of food. Like he’s always a happy man.” And I thought that that was just sort of like a fun tale that she was telling me. But when I think about it, I mean, that’s a pretty remarkable story. I think about that often because I will be in rehearsals and the scene won’t be going well, and I’ll be pulling my hair out and I’ll think, what is wrong with this? And get really down on myself. And then sometimes I remember, oh right, my grandmother rode down on a boat and she survived. So I could probably survive this.
Joe Skinner: Thank you to Jason Kim for sharing his process with KPOP The Musical.
American Masters: Creative Spark is a production of the WNET Group, media made possible by all of you. This episode was produced by Anna Ladd, Diana Chan, and by me, Joe Skinner. Our executive producer is Michael Kantor. Original music is composed by Hannis Brown. This episode was mixed and mastered by Josh Broome.
Funding for American Masters: Creative Spark was provided by the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation, the Anderson Family Fund, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, and the Philip & Janice Levin Foundation.
