Overture: Why This Butterfly Matters
Every so often a show lands in Daehak-ro that makes you sit up before the house lights even dim. In October in Seoul, I took my seat at Yes24 Stage Hall 1 for exactly that kind of evening: the world’s first musical adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. Yes, the first anywhere. Seoul got there before Broadway did.
A little history for the newcomers. Hwang’s play premiered in Washington, D.C. in 1988, then moved to Broadway’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre, where it ran 777 performances. It won the Tony Award for Best Play and the Drama Desk Award, and it was a Pulitzer finalist. In 1993 David Cronenberg filmed it with Jeremy Irons and John Lone.
Korean audiences know this piece intimately. Producer Theater Yeoljeon introduced the play here in 2012 and staged it five times through 2024, turning it into one of the company’s signature titles.
Now Yeoljeon has gone further than anyone else dared. The creative team reads like a who’s who of Korean original musicals: book and lyrics by Jung Eun-bi (Widerstand, The Red Garden), music by Namgoong Yu-jin (Williams and the Williams’ Williamses, Artis), and direction by Kim Min-jung (The Tale of April Fools, Silent Sky). Chae Hyun-won choreographs and Choi Hye-jin is music director. The run continues through December 13. My own evening starred Yoo Hyun-seok as René and Yoo Tae-yul as Song, with Jang Jae-woong as Pinkerton, Ahn Sang-eun as Agnès and Qin, and Kim Seung-yong as Toulon.
So is this a betrayal of a near-perfect play, or a bold reinvention? Grab your opera glasses. Let’s find out.
The Story: A Fantasy Replayed Nightly
The source is real. In 1986, French diplomat Bernard Boursicot stood trial for passing state secrets to China. His lover of some twenty years, Peking opera singer Shi Pei Pu, was a man and a spy. Hwang renamed them René Gallimard and Song Liling and filtered the affair through Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, with René as a would-be Pinkerton and Song as his submissive Cio-Cio-San. The musical tells it as René’s memory, replayed from a prison cell. Here is how the 19 numbers carry the plot:
- Monologue – René, imprisoned, vows to begin the story again tonight.
- The Wedding of Madame Butterfly and René’s Dream + Butterfly Woman – Puccini’s opera unfolds as a play-within-a-play. Pinkerton steps out as René’s alter ego, and René first sees Song.
- Summer Night, Streets of Beijing, Letters and My Butterfly – the courtship. Song keeps retreating; René keeps chasing.
- Dance in the Dark – the affair and the espionage braid together, with Toulon and the Communist cadre Qin circling.
- Between You and Me and Your Butterfly – René’s loveless marriage to Agnès, and his swagger as Toulon rewards him.
- Monologue 2 and A Graceful Retreat – politics turn and René is sent home to France.
- For a More Perfect Nation – the Cultural Revolution engulfs Song.
- Merely Love – Agnès’s lament for the marriage she never had.
- Letters 2 and Dance in the Dark (Reprise) – eight years later, René abandons everything for Song in Paris.
- Cio-Cio-San’s Song and Look at Me – the trial. Song drops the mask and demands to be seen.
- You in the Mirror and The Death of Madame Butterfly – René, unable to surrender the fantasy, becomes the Butterfly himself.
The Music: Puccini, Rock and a Chinese Legend
Music was always woven into M. Butterfly. The original Broadway staging leaned on Puccini alongside a score by Lucia Hwong. Puccini’s 1904 opera is the play’s skeleton, and this adaptation makes that literal. The score opens with the opera’s wedding and closes with its death scene, so René’s life is bracketed by Cio-Cio-San’s.
Composer Namgoong Yu-jin layers a second source on top. The production folds in the mood of the Chinese folk tale of the Butterfly Lovers, so Eastern and Western love myths reflect and invert each other. You hear it in Butterfly Woman, which answers Puccini’s exoticized geisha with a story China tells about itself.
The sound is deliberately hybrid. Where the play argued politics, culture and gender in dialogue, the musical moves among classical, rock and jazz. A modern band sits against classical strings, with Eastern instruments placed at key moments. Each character carries a musical motif, and melodies return in variation to track how desire shifts and cracks. The two Letters numbers and the Dance in the Dark reprise show that technique best. The same tune sounds tender early on and hollow by the end.
Song Liling actor Kim Bada says the score lets the show say in one stroke what the play had to build from tone and breath. Watch Dance in the Dark closely, he suggests: its music and choreography show both Song’s spy work and René’s diplomatic life. He also notes the composer spent a long time on this score, and it shows.
The showpieces belong to the outsiders. Toulon, Pinkerton and Agnès satirize their era and inject show-business energy, keeping the evening’s rhythm taut. Merely Love gives Agnès a ballad the play never granted her.
The Staging: From Nightmare Room to Dance Floor
To appreciate what Kim Min-jung has built, remember the last Seoul Butterfly. Boo Sae-rom’s 2024 play at Doosan Art Center’s Yeongang Hall used Hwang’s revised 2017 Broadway text. Boo pictured the stage as a nightmare René replays every night. The designer gave her a hazy off-white stage and a vast billowing curtain, with mirrors scattered about. René’s black desk and chair stood alone as his prison cell. My own memory of that staging is of something monumental, with a huge hand looming over the action. It was austere and sculptural, and above all spoken.
This musical moves. Previews promised that the play’s clashes of politics, culture and gender would be drawn three-dimensionally through dynamic choreography. Chae Hyun-won delivers. At times the evening felt closer to ballet than to a drama with songs, with bodies doing the arguing that the play left to words.
The biggest structural change is Pinkerton. He is not in Hwang’s script; here he is a full character, René’s alter ego made flesh, who stalks him and voices his appetites. Twelve actors fill the stage. Agnès and Qin are doubled by the same performer, a neat hint that both women see through René.
Kim describes her aim as peeling back, layer by layer, a character who hides himself in layers, while exploring the materials of seduction and subversion. Nam Kyung-sik designs the set, Ma Sun-young the lighting and Kim Eun-young the costumes.
Critical Reception: From Skeptics to Converts
M. Butterfly has never had an easy ride with critics, which makes it fascinating. The 1988 original was a phenomenon. Its 777 performances broke the run record then held by Amadeus. The 2017 Broadway revival, with Hwang’s rewritten text, drew a cooler response. In that rewrite, Hwang said he wanted to move past binary thinking about gender, informed by a culture more fluid about it and by new facts about the real case.
Seoul embraced that revision. The 2024 Korean premiere of the new text closed to praise for extending the play’s East–West and imperialism debates into gender and sexuality.
The musical faced real skepticism. Kim Bada, who played Song in 2024 and returns now, admits he was one of the people opposed to turning the play into a musical. He worried that taking a finished play apart would cost its unique charm. The script changed his mind: the play’s appeal survived, and the music could fill its gaps. The interviewer, who caught opening night, found it hard to believe it was a first performance.
Full reviews are still arriving in these first weeks. The question I expect critics to press is a fair one: does a structure built on René’s memory leave Song too mysterious for too long? Kim Bada himself flags that risk, noting the play had more scenes in Song’s private world.
The Verdict: Should You Catch This Butterfly?
Absolutely, and preferably before the inevitable revival tinkers with it. This first musical M. Butterfly does not replace the play; it argues with it. Where the 2024 staging sat still in a hazy white room, this one dances, and Pinkerton gives René’s desire a body you cannot look away from. Namgoong Yu-jin’s score earns its place by letting Puccini, rock and a Chinese love legend collide in the same breath.
It is not flawless. Song can feel more mirage than person until late in the evening, which is partly the point and partly a cost. But hearing Look at Me land after the trial is worth the ticket alone.
Rating: 4 out of 5 butterflies. Yes24 Stage Hall 1, Daehak-ro, until December 13, 2026. Tickets run from 40,000 to 75,000 won. Recommended for ages 17 and up.
Also from my October in Seoul: EMK’s all-new staging of Kunze and Levay’s empress, compared with Vienna and Schönbrunn, in Elisabeth in Seoul: Death Dances Again.
— References —
Interpark: M. Butterfly • Asia Business Daily: announcement and casting • BroadwayWorld: world-premiere news • The Musical: musical announcement • The Musical: Kim Bada interview • Art Korea TV: music and concept • Hangyo: autumn picks • Namuwiki: song list and creative team • The Musical: Boo Sae-rom interview • The Musical: 2024 casting and real case • The Musical: 2024 opening • The Musical: 2024 closing • ESAT: original music credits
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