Celebrating heteroglossic hybridity: Ready-to-assemble Broadway-style musicals in South Korea

British and American musical theatre has made a major contribution to the globalization of musical theatre at large, and the way in which it has been remounted and circulated in international productions has recently caught the attention of scholars. This has been particularly the case when ready-to-assemble replica Broadway-style productions have been remounted. In these productions, shows have been duplicated, from stage props and blocking to the intonation of lines, rather than having their material adapted by taking into consideration the different cultures, historical contexts and audiences. The only two elements in international remountings that are not duplicated are the performers and language; accordingly, translation of the source language into the local language becomes the cardinal factor in local audience reception. This article investigates Korean remountings of the West-End-originated, Broadway-style The Phantom of the Opera (2001), using this as a case study to illuminate a larger and multivocal debate on the remounting of international productions of Broadway-style musicals. It is my attempt to further strengthen Bruce Kirle’s emphasis on the incompleteness of theatrical texts by expanding Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories on heteroglossia and creative understanding to musical theatre, in order to argue that these two concepts serve as powerful indicators of the translation of international Broadway-style musical remountings.