The musical The Choir of Man opens on 18 September in Daehangno, Seoul. The set is a single pub called The Jungle. The bar door opens before the auditorium door does. An hour before curtain the audience climbs onto the stage and is handed a pint, and the cost of it already sits inside the ticket. One hundred minutes, sold in a 490-seat mid-size house.
1.Shinsi Company brought it over. It runs from 18 September to 3 January 2027 at the Woori Investment Securities Hall inside NOL Theater Daehak-ro. Four hundred ninety seats, 100 minutes, no interval. Around sixteen numbers, almost none of them unfamiliar. Nineteen performers were cast through five rounds of open auditions, among them Lee Chung-joo, Kim Ji-chul and Lim Jun-hyuk. The first licensed title this producer has imported since Matilda, eight years ago.
2.The original opened at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2017. Nic Doodson and Andrew Kay created it, and the set carries a bar that actually pours. When the pub opens an hour before curtain, the audience walks onto the stage, mixes with the cast and collects a pint. The producer says the performers keep passing beer and crisps into the house after the show has started.
3.On paper this show is remarkably light. No revolve, no flown scenery. The set stands still while the scenes change, and only the lighting and the bodies move. Nine performers sing while playing guitar, drums and violin themselves, backed by a live band. The money a big-house licensed musical pours into scene changes. That line simply does not exist in this budget.
4.Walk into the theatre an hour before curtain and the lobby is empty. Everyone is standing on the stage. Plastic pint cups pass from hand to hand, and footsteps carry across a stage floor that is not yet fully lit. The performers are not yet characters but bartenders, and the audience are not yet an audience but customers. Then one of the customers starts to sing. What theatres have long asked of an audience, sitting quietly and waiting. That hour has been lifted out entirely.
술을 파는 창을 뒤에서 앞으로 옮겼다
5.Because the set is one piece, this show has gone anywhere. It started in a small Edinburgh room, took a music prize at the Adelaide Fringe the following year, then played the Sydney Opera House and the Kennedy Center in Washington. In 2018 it went in as a resident show on Norwegian Cruise Line's Norwegian Escape, and Norwegian Encore picked it up the year after. In June 2021 it became the first musical to resume touring in the United States after Covid, and reopened Playhouse Square in Cleveland.
6.People who never watch musicals buy this ticket. A big-house licensed show asks two things of you: follow an unfamiliar story, and sit still for two and a half hours. The Choir of Man asks neither. The plot is nine men trading small talk in a pub, and the songs are ones you already know. Whatever might intimidate a first-time theatregoer was removed at the design stage.
7.What a pub sells is not drink but a place to sit. That is why people go out for a beer they could buy at half the price and drink at home. This show moves that place onto the stage and charges admission for it. Anyone who has gone up and clinked a glass with a performer leaves with a story from that night, and the story brings the next customer in.
8.Driving through 100 minutes without an interval is also a calculation. Food and drink revenue in West End and Broadway houses comes mostly from that twenty-minute interval. This show closes that window and opens a new one in the hour before curtain. The time to sell drink was not lost, it was pulled forward, and by then the audience is already standing on the stage.
9.Four hundred ninety seats, 108 days from 18 September to 3 January. At eight performances a week that is roughly 120 shows, or about 60,000 seats at full capacity. Put paid attendance for a licensed title in a Daehangno mid-size house at 65 to 70 percent and you get around 40,000 admissions. At an average ticket of KRW 65,000 that is roughly KRW 2.6 billion in box office. The producer has not released Korean seat prices yet. The figures above are an estimate benchmarked to Daehangno mid-size houses.
10.Next to that number the free beer looks small. A pint costs somewhere between KRW 1,500 and 2,000 at Korean wholesale. Even at a hundred pints per performance that is KRW 200,000 a day, or KRW 24 million across 120 shows. Under one percent of KRW 2.6 billion. That is what it costs to make one person tell a friend the next day that they went up on stage and were handed a beer.
11.A licensed musical usually heads for a house of 1,200 seats or more to recover its set and its guarantees. This one has almost no set to recover, so the arithmetic holds in a small room. In the West End it settled into the Arts Theatre, a studio house of about 350 seats, and ran there for more than three years from October 2021, with tickets from GBP 43 and day seats dropping to GBP 25. If a show survived three years in 350 seats, why would it fail in 490?
이 작품이 들어앉은 객석 크기
12.The building it moves into has a history of its own. NOL Theater Daehak-ro opened in 2014 as the Daehangno Musical Center, then sat dark for more than a decade after a construction cost dispute. NOL Universe leased it and reopened it on 30 January this year. Three basement levels and five above ground, with 5,200 square metres of floor area. The original three theatres were cut to two and the seat spacing widened, giving 935 and 490 seats.
13.The two halls are named Woori Card Hall and Woori Investment Securities Hall. The theatre sold its own names to financial firms. And the operator, NOL Universe, is the company behind NOL Ticket, formerly Interpark Ticket. A platform that once took only a booking fee has come down to leasing a house where the whole box office passes through its hands. Korean performing arts ticket sales reached KRW 809.4 billion in the first half of 2026, with musicals and popular music above 80 percent of it.
14.A long run in a small house is not automatic, though. The West End production closed on 31 December 2024, reopened the following March, and from this March went out on a 38-week UK tour. Instead of selling from one address it changed direction and started selling city by city. Which also says it is hard to sell this show twice to the same person.
15.A show with one set left a small room in Edinburgh, went around cruise ships and the West End, and has taken 490 seats in Daehangno. The money not spent on a revolve or on scene changes went into putting the audience on stage, and that runs about KRW 200,000 a performance. In Korea the beer is what catches first. Pouring drink inside a venue requires its own food service registration, and there is a long habit of keeping food and drink out of the auditorium. How much of the on-stage bar survives here has not been announced ahead of opening night.