After 'Gatsby,' Comes 'Wuthering Heights'... OD CEO Shinchunsoo: "Korean Creatives' Nuance Is Essential"

World premiere at Seoul Arts Center in January next year
Three-month booking of CJ Towol Theater for a five-week run

Shinchunsoo, CEO of OD company, the producer behind the Broadway success story of The Great Gatsby, is taking on the global market once again with its new production, Wuthering Heights. Based on the novel of the same name by British author Emily Brontë, the work is well known in Korea as Pokpungui Eondeok (The Hill of the Storms).

Unlike The Great Gatsby, which had its world premiere in the United States with an international creative team at its center, Wuthering Heights was developed around a Korean creative team. It will have its world premiere at the CJ Towol Theater at the Seoul Arts Center, running for five weeks from January 26 to February 28, 2027.

At a production announcement for Wuthering Heights held at SKY31 Convention in Lotte World Tower, Songpa-gu, Seoul, on November 3, Shinchunsoo said, "To bring out the explosive energy of the original work, we needed the Korean creative team's distinctive nuanced emotional storytelling, its perspective on analyzing characters, and a musical language that would amplify the narrative."

Han Jae-eun, who wrote the musicals Fan Letter and Vanishing, is writing the book and lyrics, while composer Jo Woo-in, whose musical Special 5 won the Creative Musical Award at the 15th Daegu International Musical Festival (DIMF), is composing the music. The costumes (Kim Hwan) and makeup (Kim Nam-seon) are also being handled by Korean creatives.

"Six years in the making... If Korean audiences love it, it can resonate around the world"

Wuthering Heights began development in 2020 and has gone through four workshops over six years. The Korean creative team developed the script and music through the first three workshops, and international creatives joined for the fourth workshop this year. Michael Fentiman, who was nominated for an Olivier Award for the West End musical Amélie, is directing, while Jason Howland, composer of The Great Gatsby, is handling the arrangements and orchestrations.

At OD company's 2023 "Vision and Global New Works Presentation," Shinchunsoo set out the goal of developing original intellectual property (IP) for the global market and becoming a world-class musical production company. Since then, OD company has successively presented the original musical Il Tenore, inspired by the life of Lee In-seon, known as Korea's first opera tenor, and The Great Gatsby, based on the novel of the same name by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Il Tenore earned recognition for its artistic merit by winning the grand prize at the 9th Korea Musical Awards. After its world premiere in New Jersey in 2023, The Great Gatsby arrived on Broadway in April 2024. It is the first Korean musical to enjoy an extended Broadway run. It has had more than 1,000 performances on Broadway to date, drawn a cumulative audience of over 1.4 million, and surpassed $146 million in cumulative revenue (approximately KRW 200 billion).

"OD company has continually taken on challenges with the goal of moving beyond the success of Korean musicals to create original global IP that leads the world market and become a truly world-class musical production company," Shinchunsoo emphasized. "The work that has proven this potential is The Great Gatsby. We are achieving meaningful results on Broadway by drawing on the production expertise and capabilities we have built in Korea."

However, The Great Gatsby, which ran in Seoul from August to November last year, did not enjoy the same level of success as it did on Broadway. In other words, it fell short of the high expectations of Korean audiences.

"Korean audiences are discerning viewers who delve deeply into a work and immerse themselves in it," Shinchunsoo said. "I wanted this particular work to make its debut before Korean audiences first, and then go out to the rest of the world." He added, "I believe that if Korean audiences love it, it can resonate around the world."

"A novel I stayed up all night reading in my first year of middle school... Its universality, beneath its destructive narrative, speaks to the whole world"

Shinchunsoo said that Wuthering Heights was a novel he read all night in a wave of emotion when he was in his first year of middle school. "In Wuthering Heights, the love and obsession between Heathcliff and Catherine, and revenge that cannot be forgiven, embody humanity's most intense and destructive instincts in their rawest form. It is a novel with a narrative of emotions that are both dangerous and captivating, transcending time," he explained. "When it was published, its subject matter and content were so provocative that many found them difficult to accept, and the novel sparked considerable controversy. But I believed that beneath its destructive narrative was a universality that could speak to people around the world, beyond time, culture, and language. I thought that everyone, as a human being, experiences fundamental loneliness and a thirst for love, and that these could move the hearts of audiences."

Another unusual move Shinchunsoo has made to win over Korean audiences is an exceptionally long theater production period. The company booked the CJ Towol Theater for about three months to stage the five-week run. Korean musicals generally rehearse in a separate practice space before moving into the actual venue shortly before opening, where the stage is set up and technical and dress rehearsals are held.

By contrast, Wuthering Heights will spend nearly two months in the actual theater for stage setup, technical and dress rehearsals, and private previews. Shinchunsoo stressed that the goal is to raise the production's quality as much as possible through a proper tryout process, as is done on Broadway. "The idea is to work through the challenges that arise as the show is performed in the theater in advance, make improvements, and increase its chances of success," he said. "Some might consider it an enormous research and development expense, but I believe it is a necessary process for improving the quality of the production."

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Next year, OD company will present three new global musicals in succession, including Wuthering Heights. In May, it will stage the musical adaptation of the film August Rush, which shares the film's title, followed by Great Delusion, directed by Julie Taymor of The Lion King. Unlike Wuthering Heights, the two productions are scheduled to premiere at nonprofit theaters in San Diego and New York.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.