The Tony-winning play gets its first musical adaptation, running September 22 through December 13 at Yes24 Stage Hall 1 in Seoul.Newsletter
David Henry Hwang's Tony Award-winning play M. Butterfly is being adapted into a musical for the first time, with a Seoul production running September 22 through December 13 at Yes24 Stage Hall 1 in the Daehak-ro theatre district. The news was firsTheater Yeoljeon, the Korean production company behind the adaptation, announced the staging this week. The company has a long history with the material, having first brought M. Butterfly to Korean audiences as a play in 2012 and mounted it five times through 2024, making it one of its signature titles.
Hwang's play is based on the true story of French diplomat Bernard Boursicot, dramatized as Rene Gallimard, who carried on a nearly 20-year relationship with a Peking opera performer specializing in female roles, unaware that his lover, Song Liling, was both a man and a spy for the Chinese government. Set against the Cultural Revolution, the play refracts the affair through Puccini's Madama Butterfly, casting Gallimard as a self-styled Pinkerton projecting fantasies of Eastern submission onto a partner who is quietly running the entire performance.
M. Butterfly premiered in Washington, D.C. in 1988 and transferred to Broadway's Eugene O'Neill Theatre the same year, running 777 performances through January 1990. It won the 1988 Tony Award for Best Play and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play, and was a Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist the following year. David Cronenberg's 1993 film adaptation starred Jeremy Irons and John Lone.t reported by Asia Business Daily.