Le Roi Soleil

Last weekend Nexen was playing in Pusan, but I had plans for both days to I stayed in Seoul. After the wedding on Saturday, I had a musical on Sunday night. The tickets to the musical were given to all teachers from one of our student's mom. We could ask for 2 so I did and I invited a friend out. I feel like watching a musical alone is kind of awkward. Rich people are lucky, they have enough to spare not only for their kid's teachers, but for unknown people that would go with them, I think the tickets were $130 each and we were in the VIP section. 

I chose the date I wanted: the Sunday of the second week of the presentation. 

Thing is, after the first week, articles started to come out big time : Big budget, horrible singers: The big disappointment. Thing is, the main character is an actor, not a singer. I was told by my friend who wen to the show, that he was actually pretty good, but that there were high notes that he just couldn't render as good as the other.

So I was kind of dreading it. 

My friend, a big musical fan whose sister is actually a musical actress, sounded pretty upset when he heard about the critics. Told him he didn't need to come. 

Why would I need to force someone who didn't want to see it. Shame on him. It was actually a great show. I invited a girl friend and we did a dinner coffee musical date instead. I had a great time.

I didn't take pictures with my phone during the show, least I'd disturb the people around us, so those pics are actually from this website http://www.korea.net/NewsFocus/Culture/view?articleId=119055 and I do not claim any of those as mine. 

I was really impressed by the voice of two of the supp. characters. A girl and a boy, who both had charisma and strength in their voices, and I loved the acting skills of the guy playing Louis's little brother. The main actor's voice, as I was told, was much more beautiful when he sang lower tone songs, so it was a shame that the main theme, that came back three time throughout the musical, had so many. His acting was great regardless, and he had a good complicity with the other actors. I think I must have liked the musical all the more because I expected the worst. 

It was a huge-scale show with amazing dancers, acrobats, singers and an incredible amount of backgrounds. Having played in small scale 4 musicals before, I could tell this had require an incredible amount of work and money to set up. 

And not only because they paid for the lead actor's face to be on the advertisement pamphlets.

The musical Le Roi Soleil roughly tell the life story of Louis XIV, the French womanizer king. There is much more to Louis XIV's life than women, but in the musical that is one of the main focus. 

The musical is the adaptation of the French musical written by Lionel Florence and Patrice Guirao from 2005. What I found really interesting is the way the musical was adapted in a very clever way, making it a Korean musical, while keeping the spirit of the French musical alive. There was a slight nudge of Korea in every single part of the musical. 

Costumes were more colourful, more poofy, more impressive looking, dresses reminding of the flower shape of the Korean hanbok, while still keeping the European lines of the outfits. The lead female character wearing light green, the color of the Korean bride in hanbok, is also one of the things I noticed as a Korean influcence. I don't know how much of those small things I noticed were intended, and how much of those were just naturally put this way because they just felt right for the designers, but anyways. In most western stories, we'd go for a pale pink or blue, to display the image of maidenhood and innocence.  

Interactions between the characters in Korean was reminding me more of the Joseon Era TV shows than the French court, that and the way they displayed respect with the slight head bowing and the way they called on each other. In this case, however, I don't see how they could have used a different way to communicate in Korean, than using their own vocabulary related to royalty, so this was not necessarily meant to "koreanize" the musical. 

There is a whole scene that is yelling KOREA, however, without any doubt. I have yet to listen to the original version of the musical to really be able to compare, but the scene where the Spanish princess goes to a witch to curse other ladies - or more precisely, ask of Louis that he does not look at any other women - is definitely not European. There is a big shamanistic looking tree with the typical long red strings of fabric hanging  down, and the witch herself has this way of speaking reminiscent of the Korean shaman women. I like that image of the Korean-French witch. I particularly enjoyed that scene.