Daegu International Musical Festival brings back its hit production to mark its 20th anniversary
From left: Director Robert Alfoldi, actors Lisa, Lee Gun-myung and Kim Bo-kyung, and Daegu International Musical Festival Executive Director Bae Sung-hyuck pose for photos during a press conference held at the Daegu Arts Center on Friday. (Park Ga-young/The Korea Herald)
When the 20th Daegu International Musical Festival raised its curtains on June 19, it opened with a homecoming.
The festival's flagship production — a musical reimagining of Giacomo Puccini's opera "Turandot" — returned to the stage for the first time in seven years, this time refracted through the European staging it inspired abroad.
DIMF first premiered "Turandot" in 2011, as the opening work of the festival's fifth edition. The reception was bruising.
"When we first unveiled 'Turandot' 15 years ago, there were more than a few concerns and criticisms about turning an opera into a musical," DIMF's executive director Bae Sung-hyuck recalled at a press conference on Friday at the Daegu Arts Center. Some, he added, argued that "'Turandot' and Daegu have nothing in common."
"But we believed in the potential of Korean original musicals to break into the global market, and we kept taking on the challenge," he said, pointing to results that include a run in China and overseas license exports.
In 2018, the show was staged in Slovakia and became the first Korean musical licensed to Eastern Europe. Now, that Slovak version has been brought back and grafted onto the Korean original — a staging Bae said leans further into a "more modern and artistic" direction.
Directing the revival is Hungarian theater-maker Robert Alfoldi, who staged the Slovak production. Through an interpreter, he described stripping the show down to a near-empty stage, built with designer Kalman Eszter. The intention was to shift the focus from spectacle to "human relationships, loneliness, and the search for someone to love."
That shift reshaped the performances. Where the 2011 staging leaned heavily on orientalist imagery, the new one is spare and modern, asking actors to carry the drama from within.
Lee Gun-myung, who has played the prince Calaf since the premiere, said the bare stage forced him to "pull up a deeper interior" with nothing to lean on. Returning to the title role after a decade, Lisa, who plays Turandot, said the cold, frozen princess now reveals "more human" reasons for her armor.
Musical "Turandot" (DIMF)
For Bae, the revival answers a question Daegu audiences kept asking. "People here kept asking when 'Turandot' was coming back," he said. He framed the work as part of DIMF's global ambition — a Korean creation built on what he calls the universal pull of its music — and pressed the case for running such crowd-pleasers longer for local fans.
The 20th DIMF runs from June 19 to July 6, 2026, spanning 35 productions and 122 performances across venues in the city. Alongside "Turandot," the lineup features "Harbin Enveloped in Darkness," a Chinese spy thriller.
To mark the anniversary and underscore its focus on developing talent, the festival has named musical actors Jeong Sun-ah and Kim Ho-young as ambassadors — Kim was the first recipient of the DIMF Rookie Award two decades ago.
The festival was launched in 2006, hosted by the city of Daegu as part of an initiative to establish itself as a musical hub of Asia. It has since grown into Korea's only international musical festival, a platform for cross-cultural exchange that makes a point of bringing lesser-known musicals and productions from unfamiliar territories to Korean audiences.
gypark@heraldcorp.com
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