18 actors shed 87 kilograms rehearsing for 'The Choir of Man'

Fan who learns Korean through repeat viewings finds herself part of the show

Eighteen of the 19 actors in the Korean production of "The Choir of Man" lost a combined 87 kilograms during rehearsals, except for the 19th actor, to his own surprise, who gained 10, according to the production company.

The numbers hint at what the show asks of its all-male cast. Besides acting, singing and dancing, they had to play instruments including the piano, guitar, banjo, ukulele, accordion and trumpet, many of which they learned for the show.

Yet at the press call earlier this month for the first staging of the show in a language other than English, what stood out was less the work than how close the cast seemed. They portray a barman and eight regulars at a London pub called The Jungle. The role of the Poet is shared by three actors, while two actors alternate in each of the other eight roles. One after another, they said every member of the ensemble mattered.

That closeness is, in a way, the show itself. With no conventional plot, "The Choir of Man" is built around a pub where regulars, and the audience, come together for a night. Associate director Lee Ji-yeon called it a work that "makes you feel alive together with others."

The Jungle opens early. About 20 minutes before each performance, audiences are invited onto the stage to take photos and have a nonalcoholic beer.

The night unfolds through some 16 songs, including Queen's "Somebody to Love," Sia's "Chandelier" and Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle." In the Korean production, Adele's "Hello" has been replaced by Lee So-ra's "Please."

An honorary regular

Throughout the show, audience members are pulled onstage as pub guests, mostly to be serenaded.

At the Oct. 1 performance, one of the four audience members brought onstage was a foreign national. She told the actor who invited her up that she spoke Korean, but he asked her to pretend she didn't and join the scene as a pub patron, she told The Korea Herald after the show. The bit drew laughs from the audience.

The foreign guest was Yasemin Kilic, an American of German and Turkish descent, who has attended musicals in Korea for five years. A graduate of UCLA, where she majored in Korean, she also earned an MBA at Hallym University of Graduate Studies in Seoul.

She had seen “The Choir of Man” twice before, but the Oct. 1 performance was the first time she had been brought onstage during a show. Afterward, she gave the musical 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Seeing musicals multiple times, often with different casts, is also part of how she learns Korean. Each cast brings a different energy, she said, and "because I'm still a Korean learner, I pick up the language differently." Watching the same show several times has helped her understanding, she added, "because I kept hearing the same words."

Along the way, her love of Korean musicals led her to volunteer as an interpreter at this year's Daegu International Musical Festival. She has also made her mother, who doesn't speak Korean, a fan. The two go to shows together whenever her mother visits Seoul, usually two or three times a year.

Back at The Jungle, hearing familiar pop songs in Korean felt "like listening to a new version of the song," she said. Her favorite moment is when the Poet talks about home, which brought her to tears the first time she saw it.

“When I was younger, my family moved almost every year,” Kilic said. “I never really had that feeling of home.”

Now living in Seoul, Kilic is writing her own English-language musical and plans to translate it with a Korean collaborator, hoping to stage it one day at a small theater in Daehakro, where “The Choir of Man” is playing.

If the show reminded Kilic of what home means to her, the pub on stage may recall something more familiar for many Koreans: the hof, the neighborhood beer bar where friends and coworkers gather after work. Those bars are quickly disappearing. Their number fell 11 percent over the past year to 19,057 as of August, according to National Tax Service data.

On stage in Daehakro, though, the pub stays open.

"The Choir of Man" runs through Jan. 3 at NOL Theatre Daehakro's Woori Investment Securities Hall in Seoul.