#this rant was brought to you by my love for Bare. att: your local annoying theater kid

[almayver]

Wait I do have more to add because Bare is one of those things that I remain obsessed with

So the first production was Bare: a pop opera, a popera if you will, so the acronym you usually find things about is BAPO. It opened in 2000! In Los Angeles and then transferred off Broadway in 2004. The musical happened in 2012 and...it changed a lot of things. Things that were fairly important. (And that personally I think were a miss, taking away some key elements like one character being overweight, the characters being childhood friends, and completely erasing one character's mom and her very touching emotional song. But that is just my take)

Bare is fairly popular within the musical theatre community I feel and it has had A LOT of productions all around not only the states but also around the world, and this new 2024 production is actually the like 5th time it's staged in Seoul.

In terms of plot it is about two boys having a hidden relationship in a Catholic boarding school, but the backdrop of the musical is that they are now part of the school play which is Romeo and Juliet and in many ways their story starts to share some beats with the tragedy, including partially the sad end. The show touches upon a lot of teen issues with the different characters, focused primarily of course on internalized homophobia, coming out to your parents and the weight that religion can have on someone struggling with these things

The music fucks. Genuinely. Not a bad song the entire album. And because it's an opera, meaning it's entirely sung through, you can listen to the whole album and get the whole story. It is incredibly clever in its writing, which means the tragedy is particularly painful, and its from the 2000 so some things don't entirely hold up, but it's a beautiful beautiful show and you should give it a try. Listen to the album or look up some recordings (I'm partial to the 2004 version even if the videos look like they were filmed with a potato because Michael Arden)

A Gay Korean Musical? My youtube fyp knows me so well

Today, my youtube fyp popped up with something interesting

A gay korean musical? Naturally, I had to know more.

I did some digging (most of which was simply letting the youtube algorithm do it's thing—it's usually annoying but rather useful for these purposes) and it's called Bare the Musical, and it actually appears to be a remake of an American musical of the same name (although there's apparently two version, Bare: a pop opera and Bare the musical. I do not know what the difference is, but tumblr is telling me it is significant).

Though there's no subtitles for the performances, I could gather that the story seems to be about two boys in high school who are secretly dating, one of whom is popular while the other is a loner, the latter feeling pushed away and insecure at times. It also seemed to me that religion plays a role in the whole story. And according to the internet, it seems I'm mostly right. Article about it is here and the original american musical does have a fandom on tumblr, which I surfed briefly.

However. HOWEVER. The play ends sadly, with one of the main leads dying. The bury your gays trope continues to haunt us. I honestly cannot concisely explain my disappointment when I found out, although I wasn't particularly surprised. So there's that. I don't know the plot of the musical so I'm not able to judge whether the ending was appropriate, but it was a bit of a let down regardless.

Something interesting is that the musical premiered back in 2015 (I think?), and it seems to be still going, like there's clips of it from a couple of months ago, having changed casts multiple times, which is pretty standard for musicals from what I know. While I don't know much about musical lifespans and stuff, this does imply that the play has enough traction in Korea for it to be revived multiple times over, which is intriguing, I suppose.

Anyways, I don't know much about anything surrounding this topic at all, but I thought I'd share, and if you have any insights, please do add on! More clips below (they're all fairly wholesome, I didn't find any of the darker ones and I'm not particularly inclined to go looking). They are rather delightful, so I do recommend checking a few out.

Practice clip from the official channel of the company

Performance clip of the song in the practice

Another song

One more for fun! It's the longest one I found