By Chung Ah-young
Staff Reporter
If you still feel a sense of excitement when thinking about the Beijing Olympic Games, what about keeping your heart throbbing through this ``sports'' musical?
``The Prince of Tennis,'' also known as ``Tenimyu,'' will hit the stage next month in Seoul.
The Japanese musical is based on a popular manga series of the same name, which has also been serially published in the weekly cartoon magazine ``Jump'' since 1999.
It is the first time for the Japanese original creative team and actors to perform in Seoul.
The musical stars young actors, such as Shougo Sakamoto as Ryoma Echizen, Daisuke Watanabe as Kunimitsu Tezuka and Korean-Japanese actor Gong Teyu as Takashi Kawamura.
The musical highlights vivid characters of high school athletes from the cartoon by portraying their friendship and dreams based on sports.
The musical deals with sports as the main theme, something which is hard to stage. The show is known for the detailed and well-executed depiction of the movement of a ball using sound and light, flamboyant tennis techniques and psychological portrayals of the players.
Since its premiere in 2003 in Japan, roughly 500,000 people have seen the musical.
The show has many female fans aged 15-29, representing about 99.4 percent of the total audience and widening the scope of musical fans, according to Showfac, the local musical production company.
``The musical has also a lot of fans in Korea because of the popularity of manga. So the Seoul performance is expected to draw more women, especially teen girls, to the stage, widening the audience group from the current musical fans dominated by women in their 20s-30s,'' Song Han-saem, head of the company, said.
``The Prince of Tennis'' will go on stage at the Auditorium in Samseong-dong, southern Seoul from Oct. 17-19.
Tickets cost from 25,000 to 70,000 won.
For more information, call (02) 2051-3307 or visit www.showfac.com/tennimu.