[News Culture] The Purloined Book, the psychological thriller that first reached the Daehangno stage in 2014, is being rebuilt as a musical.
The original play centered almost entirely on a battle of nerves between two men. The new version keeps that claustrophobic confrontation at its core but adds a new character, original songs and a three-piece live band, opening the story up through music without abandoning its thriller structure.
Im Kang-sung, Lee Chang-yong, Lee Hyoung-hoon and Baek In-tae will alternate as Seo Dong-yoon, while Lee Hwi-jong, Choi Min-woo, Niel and Shin Su-bin share the role of Jo Young-rak. Lee Ba-da, Lee Da-jung, Lee Min-jung and Oh Hee-sun appear as the newly created Vocalist.
The musical runs Dec. 19 through Feb. 28, 2027, at Seowoo Art Center Hall 1 in Daehangno. The venue will reopen following renovations in time for the production.
A TWO-MAN PSYCHOLOGICAL DUEL GETS A MUSICAL EXPANSION
The story begins with writer Seo Dong-yoon being kidnapped just as his career appears to be reaching a moment of recognition.
His captor is Jo Young-rak, a former assistant writer with unfinished business.
Young-rak forces Dong-yoon to write a screenplay about a writer in creative decline who commits murder and steals someone else’s work. What begins as a writing assignment quickly becomes a psychological trap.
Confined to the same space, the two men test each other through accusation, memory and manipulation, while the line between the screenplay being written and the reality surrounding them gradually becomes harder to separate.
That closed-room tension was central to the stage play. The musical adaptation does not simply add songs to the same structure; it introduces another presence through which the characters’ inner lives can surface.
THE VOCALIST GIVES THE STORY A NEW VOICE
The Vocalist does not exist in the original play.
Created specifically for the musical, the character gives musical form to the writers’ buried desires and shifting states of mind, adding another layer to a story previously driven almost entirely by dialogue between Dong-yoon and Young-rak.
A three-piece band will perform live onstage, following the characters’ emotional turns in real time.
The musicians are divided into two rotating teams. The lineup includes drummer Kim Hoon-sik, who has worked as a guest percussionist with Guckkasten; guitarist Lee Jun, whose musical credits include Trace U and The Devil; and bassist Song Ki-ha.
The score will move between sparse, stripped-down passages and heavier rock textures, using the band to heighten rather than soften the pressure of the confined setting.
FOUR ACTORS TAKE ON EACH SIDE OF THE CONFRONTATION
Im Kang-sung, Lee Chang-yong, Lee Hyoung-hoon and Baek In-tae will play Seo Dong-yoon.
Im has built a substantial musical-theater career through productions including The Brothers Karamazov, while Lee Chang-yong has moved between intimate and large-scale shows such as The Story of My Life and Rebecca.
Lee Hyoung-hoon brings a particularly unusual history with the material. He played Jo Young-rak in the 2017 stage production and now returns to the same story from the opposite side, taking on Seo Dong-yoon.
Baek In-tae, a tenor who became widely known through JTBC’s Phantom Singer, has appeared in musicals including Evita and Paganini.
Opposite them, Lee Hwi-jong, Choi Min-woo, Niel and Shin Su-bin will alternate as Jo Young-rak.
Choi’s stage credits include Cinderella Homme and Gutenberg! The Musical!, while Niel, who debuted as a member of Teen Top, has continued building his musical-theater career through productions including Secretly, Greatly: THE LAST.
Shin has appeared in works including Wild Grey and Diaghilev, bringing a background in character-driven small- and mid-scale musicals to the role.
TWO SINGERS MAKE THEIR MUSICAL DEBUTS
Lee Ba-da, Lee Da-jung, Lee Min-jung and Oh Hee-sun share the newly created Vocalist role.
Singer-songwriter Lee Ba-da, whose distinctive voice drew attention on JTBC’s Sing Again 3, will make her musical debut in the production. Lee Min-jung, who has released music including Believe Me and staged her own concerts, is also entering musical theater for the first time.
Lee Da-jung brings experience from productions including Hadestown and Dear Evan Hansen, while Oh Hee-sun, formerly of the girl group Matilda, has appeared in musicals including Love in the Rain and Roulette.
Their casting underlines how central the Vocalist is to the adaptation. Rather than functioning as a conventional supporting character, the role is designed to carry parts of the story that previously remained inside the two men.
A DAEHANGNO THRILLER RETURNS IN A DIFFERENT FORM
Yoo Sun-dong wrote the original work. The director and screenwriter later became known for television series including The Uncanny Counter, Bad and Crazy and Vampire Prosecutor 2.
The story won recognition at the Korea Story Contest in 2011 and was selected for a Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture creative support program in 2014.
The stage version premiered that year at Chungmu Art Hall’s Small Theater Blue and went on to play five seasons in Daehangno. Its stripped-down format and escalating battle between two characters became its defining feature, with performers including Park Ho-san, Lee Kyu-hyung, Lee Chung-joo and Kang Ki-doong appearing in earlier seasons.
Kim Ga-ram is handling the musical adaptation. Her previous writing credits include Yumi’s Cells, Arranga and Eternity. For The Purloined Book, she has reworked the original relationships and narrative for a musical format while introducing the Vocalist as a way of externalizing the characters’ inner conflicts.
Park Jun-young, whose directing credits include Next to Normal, leads the production.
Kim Jae-hoon writes the score, marking his first full musical. His previous work has ranged from minimalist theatrical sound to rock, a range that fits a production attempting to preserve the intimacy of a psychological thriller while giving it a more forceful musical vocabulary.
More than a decade after its first stage production, The Purloined Book is not returning as a simple revival.
The central confrontation remains between Dong-yoon and Young-rak, but a third voice and a live band now sit inside that conflict. The question for the musical version is whether music can reveal what the original two-hander kept tightly contained—and make an already tense room feel even harder to escape.
The Purloined Book runs Dec. 19 through Feb. 28, 2027, at Seowoo Art Center Hall 1 in Daehangno, Seoul.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
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