By Kurt Achin
Woohae Cho for The New York Times
On Stage in Seoul: Building on the phenomenal popularity of Korean pop music and soap operas among women in their 20s and 30s, Broadway and Korean producers are turning Seoul into a boomtown for American musicals.
SEOUL, South Korea — The packs of young women arrived 90 minutes early for the evening's show: "Murder Ballad," a rock musical that flopped off Broadway in July and then opened here four months later in an all-Korean production. They wanted time to shoot smartphone video of Seoul's newest theater, built inside a shopping mall, and start scoring autographs: of actors, sure, but lighting operators and makeup artists too.
Or anyone, really, working on American musicals, whose head-spinning popularity here has changed the game for New York producers looking to extend the lives of their shows.
Seoul has become a boomtown for American musicals, with Korean and Broadway producers tapping into an audience of young women raised on the bombast of Korean pop and the histrionics of television soap operas. Ticket sales to American and European musicals, as well as to a sprinkling of Korean originals, have grown from $9 million in 2000 to an estimated $300 million this year, and a frenzy of licensing deals is underway.
Proven hits like "Wicked," "Mamma Mia!" and "Grease" have opened here this fall, but so, too, have Broadway failures like "Ghost" and "Bonnie & Clyde," challenging assumptions about taste, tolerance and translation. The quintessential New York story "Guys and Dolls," it turns out, works in Korean, so long as Miss Adelaide is played by an actress nearly 10 years older than her Nathan Detroit, to reflect the trend of older women dating younger men in Seoul.
And even with its short Off Broadway run, the four-character "Murder Ballad" found fans far away.
"I watched the New York production on YouTube and became obsessed," said Lee Joo-young, a 30-year-old researcher, speaking through an interpreter, after a recent performance. "It's so emotional and sexy and thrilling. Americans are so great at making these shows."
Audiences in London; Hamburg, Germany; and São Paolo, Brazil, are also known for having big appetites for American musicals, but the energy and entrepreneurism in Seoul are startling. With 300 theaters already — about the same number as in New York — the city keeps building to accommodate the crush: A Methodist megachurch just built a Broadway-style house, while another 600-seat theater recently opened among barbecue restaurants. And audiences are dominated by young people, a generational contrast to the graying audiences in the West.
"Seoul has become incredibly important in the lives of many musicals, something none of us would've said or predicted a decade ago," said Judy Craymer, the lead producer of "Mamma Mia!" In 2004, Ms. Craymer joined forces with a Buddhist monk and his producing partner on the first of 12 productions across South Korea, the latest opening here last month.
"It's become this fantastic flagship for the foreign market, because Koreans travel so much to New York and London, and they care deeply about brands — like Broadway," Ms. Craymer said. "A huge amount of theater's repeat business comes from Korea; they see it on Broadway, then see it at home and so on. And, best of all, it's this huge young audience. The growth potential is enormous."
The rewards have become significant for American producers. They typically receive 15 percent of the box office gross, as well as licensing and management fees in some cases, revenue that can total millions of dollars and offset losses on Broadway.
And they see South Korea as a model for eventually doing business in an even bigger future market, China.
Ask Edward Strong, a partner in Dodger Theatricals, which is bringing another unmistakably American musical, "Jersey Boys," to Seoul for the first time in January as part of an English-language tour.
"All of Asia is a potential market for 'Jersey Boys,' " he said. "But right now, Seoul is the major market, ever since the economic recession cooled theater activity in Japan. And we want to learn from our experience in Seoul and take that knowledge elsewhere in Asia."
The strong business from young women (and plenty of young men too) is generally attributed to the fact that Koreans in their 20s and 30s tend to earn good salaries but live with their parents until marriage. This leaves them money to spend on tickets, which cost roughly the same as in New York.
Su Hyun Lee contributed reporting.
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