Opening at Blue Square in Seoul This July
Performances in Busan in November and Daegu in January Next Year
The original touring cast of the blockbuster musical 'Wicked' is returning to Korea for the first time in 13 years since its Korean premiere.
The production company S&Co announced on the 10th that the original Wicked tour will open on July 12 at Blue Square Shinhan Card Hall in Yongsan-gu, Seoul. After concluding the Seoul performances on October 26, the Wicked original touring cast will continue shows in Busan and Daegu. The opening in Busan Dream Theater is scheduled for November, and the Daegu opening at Keimyung Art Hall is planned for January next year.
Wicked premiered on Broadway in 2003 and has enjoyed enduring popularity ever since. To celebrate its 20th anniversary, a Wicked tour has been organized, starting in Australia, then Singapore in March, and finally Korea. Wicked had its Korean premiere in 2012 at Blue Square.
Wicked has been seen by over 70 million people in 16 countries worldwide and has generated $6 billion in revenue. It ranks second in Broadway history after The Lion King and achieved the fourth longest-running musical record with 7,486 performances as of April 2023. In the last week of December last year, it set a new record as the first Broadway musical to surpass $5 million in weekly gross revenue. The recorded revenue at that time was $5,037,392 (approximately 7.22 billion KRW). In the UK West End, it also set a historic highest weekly gross of ?1,701,637 in the first week of January this year.
At the 58th Tony Awards in 2004, Idina Menzel, who played Elphaba, won Best Actress in a Leading Role, and the production also took home awards for set design and costume design, achieving a triple crown. Additionally, Wicked has won over 100 awards worldwide, including the Drama Desk Awards, Laurence Olivier Awards, and Grammy Awards. The album composed and written by Stephen Schwartz has been certified 'Triple Platinum.'
Last year, the musical was adapted into a film of the same name starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, which grossed over $700 million. It became the highest-grossing musical film adaptation of all time and attracted 2.2 million viewers in Korea.
The musical is based on the novel of the same name by Gregory Maguire, published in 1995, which has sold over 6 million copies to date. Of these, 5.5 million copies were sold after the musical's premiere, and thanks to the film release last year, the 30th anniversary of the book, it returned to No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list.
Wicked is a musical adaptation of Gregory Maguire's bestseller that humorously reimagines the classic 'The Wizard of Oz' from a different perspective, focusing on the witches of Oz. The protagonists of Wicked, which tells the story before 'The Wizard of Oz,' are Elphaba, who is smart, passionate, and uniquely talented but misunderstood because of her green skin, and Glinda, who is lively, blonde, ambitious, and popular. Although they were initially opposites who bickered, they eventually became friends, but society instead labeled one as the 'Good' witch and the other as the 'Wicked' witch, discriminating between them.
The original author Maguire said about this, "I wanted to talk about how people create villains." Wicked critiques social prejudice and preconceptions, prompting reflection on what true good and evil really are.
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