A musical about life in a North Korean concentration camp that features heartbreaking lyrics, such as, "In my dreams I can still see my starving brothers and sisters," drew standing-room-only crowds brought in by the busload during its four-night Los Angeles run, which ended Sunday.
When an unexpected snag only a few days before its opening meant the show could not be performed at the Scottish Rite Auditorium in Hancock Park, a coalition of local Korean American churches scrambled to find a new venue. The churches then decided to offer free admission. Hundreds of people each night were turned away.
"The North Korea issues, with their gulags, imprisonment and torture, are very important topics in the hearts of Korean Americans," said Sam Kim, a spokesman for the church coalition. "A lot of people are coming in sympathy for what's happening and also because there is no cover charge."
"Yoduk Story," created by Jung Sung San, who grew up in an elite family in the North's capital of Pyongyang before escaping in 1994 to South Korea, hopes his musical will bring attention to numerous concentration camps the totalitarian regime operates, which have been documented by human rights groups with satellite photographs and interviews with defectors who served in them.
"The atrocities of Hitler are happening now," Jung says.
He also hopes the production will avenge the death of his father, who was executed for Jung's defection, a common pattern in North Korea, where family members often pay a price for relatives' infractions.
The fictional story is loosely based on the experience of the show's dance director, Kim Yung Soon, 68, who was imprisoned nine years in the Yoduk camp, where her husband, son, father and brother perished. At the end of the performance, she appears on stage to tell the audience that what's happening "is all real" at Yoduk, where starving prisoners toil in coal mines and farms and are shot if caught trying to escape.
"Yoduk Story" opened in March in South Korea, where more than 100,000 people have seen it. To finance the production, Jung said, he offered his left kidney on the black market in South Korea as collateral to borrow $20,000 from a loan shark.
A play would have been too boring, Jung said, so he added musical numbers to perk it up. The show is reminiscent of "Les Miserables," with singing and dancing to balance the macabre shootings and other atrocities. The story centers on an actress in Pyongyang whose father meets his South Korean brother, whom he hasn't seen since the Korean War divided the peninsula. The actress is then banished to Yoduk for her father's action.
