A new Wuthering Heights musical

According to Seoul Economic Daily and others, we can expect a new Wuthering Heights musical in January 2027.

Shin Choon-soo, chief executive and producer of OD Company who has been active on Broadway, will unveil "Wuthering Heights," a new musical aimed at the global market, in January. It is his first global project in three years, following "The Great Gatsby," which opened on Broadway in 2024.

OD Company said at a news conference at SKY31 in Lotte World Tower on the 3rd that the original musical "Wuthering Heights" will have its world premiere at the CJ Towol Theater of the Seoul Arts Center from Jan. 26 to Feb. 28 next year. The production is a new adaptation by a Korean creative team of the novel by British author Emily Brontë.

"I remember staying up all night, overwhelmed with emotion, after reading the work as a middle school student," Shin said. "Turning such a well-known classic into a musical does carry some pressure, but I chose it because the source material is so compelling — it is hard to find a story this absorbing, with such deep interior lives and narrative power."

The production goes beyond the love and revenge between Heathcliff and Catherine that form the core of the novel, extending into the tragedy and passion carried on by the next generation. Where previous films and stage works focused mainly on the love, conflict and revenge surrounding Heathcliff, Catherine and Catherine's brother, this production widens the story to ask how the wounds of the parents' generation affect the one that follows.

Notably, one actor plays both Catherine and her daughter, portraying a figure who witnesses and consoles Heathcliff's loneliness and madness. "It poses a fundamental question about whether the wounds left by the parents' generation and the cycle of destructive revenge carry on into the next," Shin said.

Another distinguishing feature is that Korean creators led the development of the work. "I believed that the delicate emotional shading characteristic of Korean creative teams, and a musical language that maximizes narrative, could bring out the explosive energy of the original," Shin said. The book and lyrics are by Han Jae-eun, known for the musicals "Fan Letter" and "Time of Dogs and Cats," with music by Jo Woo-in, who composed the scores for "Nambeol" and "SPECIAL S."

Joining them are Michael Fentiman, a director who has worked in London's West End, and Jason Howland, an arranger active on Broadway. Howland is also known as the composer of the Korean original musical "Swing Days: Codename A." OD Company plans to present the work to Korean audiences first before taking it overseas. Specific overseas performance schedules and destinations have not yet been confirmed.

Shin has expanded his presence in the global musical market since bringing "The Great Gatsby" to Broadway in 2024. "The Great Gatsby" is still running on Broadway in an open-ended engagement, and has drawn about 1 million theatergoers and recorded about 200 billion won ($136 million) in revenue through its Broadway run and North American tour.

High production and operating costs mean the show has yet to break even. "Musicals are a genre where you can only turn a profit by sustaining performances over the long term through open-ended runs and tours," Shin said, stressing that productions must be developed and managed with a long-term view. The plan for "Wuthering Heights" is likewise to build competitiveness in the global market through continued performances rather than short-term box-office success. (Lee Hye-jin)

From The Korea Herald:

Producer Shin Chun-soo took “The Great Gatsby” from its 2024 Broadway premiere to London and Seoul. His next musical, another classic novel adaptation developed alongside “Gatsby,” carries the same global ambition but reverses the route.

“Wuthering Heights,” based on Emily Bronte’s 1847 novel, will have its world premiere in Seoul in January, rather than in London, as Shin had once considered.

The 58-year-old veteran producer told reporters Tuesday that he decided to bet on a Korean writer and composer — and on Korean audiences, whom he described as deeply engaged and discerning.

“I really wanted this one to have its world premiere in Seoul,” he said. “I hoped to show it to these audiences first, then take it out to the world.”

The decision comes as “Gatsby” gives Shin a footing few Korean producers have had on Broadway. [...]

With “Wuthering Heights,” he has put a Korean writer and composer at the center, joined by Korean designers and an international team that is largely British.

“With ‘Gatsby,’ I read the English script and the translated script over and over, and fighting over every single line was really hard,” Shin said. “Working with Korean writers, the density of the story and the detail of the emotions really pile up. That is the solid core of this piece.”

The book and lyrics are by Han Jae-eun, known for intimate musicals “Fan Letter” and “It Rains Cats and Dogs.” The score is by Cho Woo-in, a classically trained composer who studied at Hanyang University and in US. Cho is not yet a mainstream name, but Shin said he recognized the Korean composer’s musicality long ago, and the two writers have been developing the show together since 2020.

Costume designer Kim Hwan, who works in Germany, and makeup designer Kim Nam-sun round out the Korean side. They are joined by British director Michael Fentiman, choreographer Alexzandra Sarmiento, set designer Max Jones and lighting designer Tim Lutkin, who designed “Life of Pi.” Jason Howland, who composed “Gatsby,” is the music supervisor and orchestrator.

Shin is also bringing a Broadway-style development process to a Korean stage. Most productions, he said, move quickly from setup to previews to opening night, leaving little time to fix what does not work.

For “Wuthering Heights,” OD Company has rented the 1,004-seat CJ Towol Theater for three months, though the show will run for only five weeks. The rest of the time goes to setup, technical and dress rehearsals and closed previews. (Park Ga-young)

We are not leaving the stages in Asia yet as China Daily reports that a Huju opera called Moonlight Shadow is based on Jane Eyre.

The polished revised edition of Huju opera Moonlight Shadow, produced by the Shanghai Changning District Huju Opera Heritage Preservation Center, premiered on Tuesday night at the Hongqiao Art Center.

It adapts Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre into a Shanghai folk-opera performed in Shanghainese, the intangible cultural heritage that bears distinctive Haipai cultural genes.

Belonging to Huju's iconic "suit-and-cheongsam" drama genre, the story is reset in early‑20th‑century Shanghai, a city deeply embedded in the Jiangnan cultural sphere. It traces orphan governess Feng Mingyue and Lu Peiyan, master of Linhu Manor. The pair goes through conflicts and misunderstandings before developing a sincere love built on mutual dignity and equality. The adaptation preserves the spiritual core of the original novel while infusing strong regional Shanghai and Jiangnan artistic charm.

Helmed by Yi Tianfu, professor at Shanghai Theatre Academy, this upgraded version comes four years after its 2022 debut. National first-class actor Wang Bin takes on the role of Lu, while Zhu Zhen — the city's young Huju-opera intangible-cultural-heritage inheritor — plays heroine. The cast has refined vocal tunes, stage visuals, and character interactions to achieve more nuanced psychological expression.

"Onstage, every gesture, glance, and pause must convey unspoken inner thoughts, rather than merely reciting lines," Wang said. "For this revival, we have dug far deeper into subtle, progressive emotional shifts between our two characters to avoid flat performances."

Zhu pointed out the real-world dilemma facing Shanghainese inheritance. "Many young Shanghai residents can understand the dialect, yet feel too shy to speak it," she said. "Live theater gives us a vivid, public channel to hand down this precious linguistic heritage to younger generations." (Zheng Yiran)

On Literary Hub, Schneider K. Rancy writes about his Haitian retelling of The Odyssey, Beyond the Baths of Stars.

It’s hard to understate the importance of the classical tradition to postcolonial literature. The Puerto Rican playwright Luis Rafael Sánchez recast Sophocles’ Antigone in La pasión según Antígona Pérez, set in the fictional Caribbean republic of Molina, to portray the United States’s extreme economic and political suppression of 1960s Puerto Rican nationalist movements.

In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s response to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the Dominican-British novelist fabulated a Creolized backstory for the “mad wife” Rochester abuses and keeps stashed away in his attic, painting a picture of colonial detest and neglect. The Martinican poet/playwright Aimé Césaire brilliantly adapted and enriched Shakespeare’s The Tempest into Caliban’s existential drama after having his name, language and identity stolen from him upon Prospero’s arrival in Une Tempête, dramatizing the colonial dilemma of all Caribbean island nations. More contemporaneously, Jamaican poet and memoirist Safiya Sinclair viscerally wrote to and through Césaire’s own seminal rewrite in her guttural poetry collection Cannibal to reframe the issue of postcolonial identity for one who has immigrated to the metropole of the imperial power, in this case the United States. This Caribbean tradition of literary hybridity, intertextuality, and relation is long.

In college, I didn’t know or care about any of that.

In an interview for Cadena Ser (Spain), journalist Ana Mellado mentions Emily Brontë as one of her influences.