'Annual musical awards a mess'
Seol Do-yoon
By Kwon Mee-yoo
Korea’s performing arts industry, encouraged by a rapidly growing market for musical theater, decided a few years ago that it needed two separate annual awards to celebrate the best work in musicals. The clumsy attempts to create differences between the two have, ever since, been an endless source of nonsense and awkwardness.
The Korea Musical Awards (KMA), established in 1995 and held in October every year since, continues to be the weightier event. The Musical Awards (TMA), established 12 years later, has been desperate to establish its own identity and now seems to be taking extreme measures to acquire its own character.
TMA is now basically trying to be the Korean equivalent of the Tony Awards, a lavish celebration of Broadway productions and performances. It has limited this year’s entries to large productions, drawing the cut-off line at theaters with a minimum of 400 seats.
This is an ill-advised decision because most creative input in the industry is done for work performed in smaller theaters. Only 23 of the 400 musicals staged in Korea last year were performed in facilities with more than 400 seats.
The musical “The Goddess is Watching,” a story about South and North Korean soldiers finding a way to coexist on a deserted island during the Korean War (1950-53), has been one of the most popular and critically-acclaimed Korean musicals of the past year. Well, it couldn’t even qualify for TMAs, because the builders of the 393-seat Art One Theater in Daehangno, Seoul, failed to find room for seven more seats.
Seol Do-yoon, this year’s chief organizer, repeatedly reminds reporters that the Tony Awards nominates productions that are staged in theaters with 500 or more seats. TMA modified the standard to meet with Korean conditions and lowered the number to 400.
“We have to recognize the commercial value of musicals and adopted similar criteria to the Tony Awards,” Seol said. “It is impossible for our nominating committee to watch all 400 musicals staged in Korea every year, so we think this criteria will improve our integrity as well.”
But what about TMA’s original goal to reward originality and creative input? Seol didn’t seem too bothered about making those values secondary.
TMA’s judging process also has problems. A seven-member committee picks nominees for 17 categories. A jury of 100 judges — consisting of 60 journalists and 40 theater directors and producers — chooses the winning works for each category.
However, TMA organizers don’t seem to have any control over whether the judges saw all the works or not: they don’t provide them with tickets for the performances, just assuming that the judges watch them.
As a theater reporter, I try to spend every evening in the theater and often watch the same show multiple times to watch different actors play the same role or even study minor adjustments to every production.
However, I would still fail as a TMA judge.
The candidates for the Best Actor are Ryu Jung-han (Maxim de Winter of “Rebecca”); Michael K. Lee (Jesus of “Jesus Christ Superstar”); Park Eun-tae (Jesus of “Jesus Christ Superstar”); Chung Sung-hwa (Albin of “La Cage aux Folles”) and Chung Sung-hwa (Jean Valjean of “Les Miserables”). I watched the ongoing production of “Superstar,” but only Lee’s Jesus and not Park’s, so I cannot possibly pick who is the best among these five — or four — candidates.
It’s hard to blame TMA for attempting to mimic the Tony Awards, but by ignoring the realities of the Korean musical scene, organizers are just attempting to fly like an eagle with the wings of a wren.
TMA 2013 will be held at the National Theater of Korea on June 3 and televised through JTBC and QTV.