Roly Poly Promotional Poster
In July of 2011, T-Ara released the single “Roly Poly”, with a video set in a 1970′s disco club.
January 13th, “Roly Poly” the musical opened at Seongnam Arts Centre.
It had been a very VERY long time since I’d been to see a musical. Last show I went to was Tenimyu in Japan, and On Air in South Korea. So despite my minor dislike for the group T-Ara, and my suspicions at any show that could go from concept to stage in less than six months, I headed over to Seongnam to see Hyomin and Soyeon from T-Ara in one of their few performances in the musical.
Before the show could even start, I was really impressed. Not by the show, but the theatre. The Seongnam Arts Centre is one of the nicest theatres I have been too. Period. The opera hall was warm, and smelled like cedar in a really nice sauna. The hall was gorgeous, a majestic three floors looking over a massive stage, everything acoustically and aesthetically pleasing. My seat was fantastic, a second level wrap seat, probably one of the best seats for the lowest ticket level (77,000 won) so my seat was much closer to the stage than it probably should have been for that price. I was also really excited, because the theatre was equipped with side screens, which are often used for subtitles, usually in Japanese.
There were no subtitles though. Not in Japanese or English. Which I felt was a waste of the resources at their disposal.
I thought that “Roly Poly” was a decent show. It was cute, with a pretty basic story. Even with my absolute zero knowledge in Korean, I was able to follow along decently, thanks to good staging and decent acting to help the dialogue along. The quality of the singing really impressed me as well, and I was really pleased with the level ot the talent on stage.
However, the subtitle thing did bother me. If you go on Interpark, the option is there to get tickets on the English site as well. Which is fine, this alone doesn’t mean that there should be some form of translation provided. However, there is no plot summary on the English site, and instead, this is what they say:
Since the musical was planned to promote the popularity of K-pop and be shown in Southeast Asia from the onset, it was already predictable that T-ara, the leaders of K-POP, would perform in the musical.
The musical ambitiously intends to take off from the domestic musical market that runs rampant with foreign loyalty shows, and to promote the K-POP hype to domestic as well as international music market.
I like to think that, if you’re advertising a musical and saying you want to promote k-pop internationally, and you want to show it in Southeast Asia… You really should have subtitles in either English, Japanese, or Chinese, because those are the three languages that k-pop artists deal with the most.
But I digress.
Curtain call!
The musical was a jukebox musical, made up of a lot of songs from the era. Songs by artists like Cyndi Lauper, Brian Adams, Kylie Minogue, and Dionne Warwick are throughout the show, though you might not always recognize them. Naturally, the songs have been translated to Korean. As I’ve said, my Korean isn’t the best, however there were a few songs where I was listening along and wondered to myself, “Do these lyrics fit the original song at all, or was it rewritten to go with the script?” However, that could be me just not understanding Korean as well as I should.
The show itself reminded me a lot of the movie “Now And Then”, which is a compliment, because I love that movie. It’s the Korean version though, because true to Korean drama fashion, someone must die. The show opens at a busy scene in Incheon Airport in modern time, with a young woman stopping a bag thief. As soon as she’s returned the bag, she gets a phone call with bad news.
The next few scenes are a jumble, showing some other older women in their current situations in life. All of them have some kind of stress or trouble. After a few scenes, we finally find out that the woman in the airport’s mother passed away, and she has returned home for the wake. The three older women walk in, sobbing loudly and dramatically (a fourth friend would show up a few scenes later to round out the group of five) and over drinks, they reminisce on their teen years together, the five of them making the group “Roly Poly”.
Finally, after about 20 minutes, the show flashbacks to the 70′s, and the story really begins.
Encore! Roly Poly time.
Everything about this show seemed big. The support cast was quite large, and were used quite a bit. I almost felt like the stage and theatre was a bit too big for this show. On a night when two of the T-Ara members were performing, the theatre should have been close to selling out, but it wasn’t even close. I think that they could have achieved a much more intimate theatre experience in a smaller theatre, and would have ensured they sold all their tickets. There was no expense spared with the sets as well, everything very details, with lots of roll-ins and drops.
One of my favourite parts of the show was something they probably didn’t anticipate, since the vast majority of the audience is Korean and thus would be really familiar with their own history. Throughout this relatively simple story of five girls coming together and forming a life long bond, the writers were able to get little bits of history into the story. There was a brief scene that had some of the characters involved in the Gwangju Democratization Movement riot in May, 1980. I’m starting to learn about and take interest in the modern history of Korea, with the Korean war and everything after, so seeing that in the show was really interesting for me because it reminded me of what was happening in the country then, and remembering that only 30 years ago, South Korea was under a military dictatorship. How times have changed…
Did I think the show was good? Yes, it was decent. The music was well performed, the sets were fantastic, and the acting was good. The story was simple enough to follow, though a decent knowledge of Korean would be helpful. To me, it definitely felt like a show that was written and put together very quickly while the Roly Poly song was still well known by people, and so there were things that I noticed as a scriptwriter and theatre student. But to most, it would go unnoticed.
If you’re a T-Ara fan, you’ll enjoy the show, so long as you go on the right night.
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“Roly Poly” runs from January 13th to February 25th at the Seongnam Arts Centre. The show will then move to Busan for March 10th and 11th, and Cheongsu for March 24th and 25th. Tickets can be bought on Interpark.
