GOYANG, Gyeonggi Province — Benson Boone didn't walk onto the stage for his latest Korean concert. He flipped onto it. Standing atop a grand piano as screams filled Kintex Exhibition Center 2 in Goyang on Monday, the 24-year-old American singer-songwriter launched himself into a backflip before kicking off “Sorry I’m Here for Someone Else.” It was a fitting introduction to the energy-packed 100-minute show. Across 20 songs, Boone sprinted across the stage, threw himself into his signature backfl

The opening sentence of Min Jin Lee's "American Hagwon," sets the terms for a new story about Korean families, migration and the enduring belief that education can secure a better future: "The rules of engagement have changed already." It's an approach she used in her previous work. The million-selling multigeneration saga "Pachinko," opens with the line, "History has failed us, but no matter." Her debut novel, "Free Food for Millionaires," begins with a similarly frank statement — "Competence c

Eighteen of the 19 actors in the Korean production of "The Choir of Man" lost a combined 87 kilograms during rehearsals, except for the 19th actor, to his own surprise, who gained 10, according to the production company. The numbers hint at what the show asks of its all-male cast. Besides acting, singing and dancing, they had to play instruments including the piano, guitar, banjo, ukulele, accordion and trumpet, many of which they learned for the show. Yet at the press call earlier this month fo

Four years after their debut, &Team arrived at Seoul’s Kspo Dome with a performance that showed just how far the nine-member group has come. The nine-member group wrapped up “Blaze the Way,” its largest Asia tour to date, with two encore concerts Saturday and Sunday at the venue in southern Seoul, bringing a five-month journey across 14 cities and 23 shows to a close. The tour drew some 230,000 concertgoers in total and included &Team’s first solo dome concert at Belluna Dome in Saitama, Japan,

NCT 127 spent much of its 10th anniversary concert demonstrating just how strong the group’s identity is. At “The Redline,” held Friday through Sunday at KSPO Dome in southern Seoul, the group did not attempt to disguise the absence of Doyoung and Jungwoo, who are serving their mandatory military service. Instead, it reshaped familiar songs, redistributed parts and leaned on a decade of chemistry to prove that the group’s performance remains no less engaging despite its current five-member confi

Korea Herald correspondent NEW YORK — “I went to New York. It was an amazing city. A perfect place to live as an alcoholic.” A burst of laughter rippled through the Wade Thompson Drill Hall. The line comes from Song Do-young, the heroine of Simon Stone’s Korean-language adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” played by Jeon Do-yeon. Do-young is recalling the 10 years she spent in New York after the death of her son — a detail that, in this version, replaces Chekhov’s Paris. It was an

There are some inevitable hurdles to bringing the Broadway musical "Hell's Kitchen" to the Seoul stage as a Korean-language production. Rooted in Alicia Keys’ music and her semi-autobiographical story of growing up in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, the musical arrived in Seoul just two years after its Broadway opening as its first non-English-language licensed production. The Korean production, which opened July 24 at the GS Arts Center, offers an early test of what happens when a story so rooted in

Don't let the title fool you: "The Assassin(s)" is no hitman picture. Director Hur Jin-ho's latest is the first Korean film set in the country's authoritarian past that puts the reporters who risked their lives going after the truth front and center. What you get is a well-made journalism procedural based on the 1974 shooting that killed then-first lady Yuk Young-soo, one that has every chance of joining the ranks of recent politically forthright period hits like "1987" and "12.12: The Day." Tha

GOYANG, Gyeonggi Province — Big Bang kicked off its 20th anniversary world tour over the weekend with its first full-group concert in nearly nine years, signaling that the group's next chapter has only just begun. “XX: Cosmos,” held from Friday to Sunday at Goyang Stadium, drew more than 100,000 fans over three days. Toward the end of Sunday’s show, the members hinted that more music would be on the way after “Biiig,” the digital single released on the group's anniversary, Aug. 19. Daesung raise

Visitors expecting Georg Baselitz's famous upside-down figures at his first Korean museum retrospective are greeted instead by a picture of cattle, hung front and center right upon entering the galleries. In it, two cows stand in a green pasture. A clean horizontal cut runs through the canvas, and the halves sit out of register, so that muzzles and shoulders no longer align. The picture hangs right side up, yet it manages to unsettle all the same. "Two Cows Divided I" (1966), the oldest work in