by Frank Hecker, Staff Writer

The Takarazuka Revue has inspired several manga and anime. Now comes Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born, a Korean drama (currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+) that features an analogous 1950s-era all-female gukgeuk troupe performing plays based on classic Korean tales and featuring songs sung in the traditional pansori style. Jeongnyeon the series features Yoon Jeongnyeon the performer (played by Kim Tae-ri), a natural-born pansori genius who goes from working as a fishmonger to joining the Maeran Theater Company as a trainee and competing to become its new “prince.”

If you’ve heard about Jeongnyeon at all, you’ve likely heard that it’s based on a yuri webcomic of the same name, and that the explicit yuri elements were erased in the live-action adaptation. This is true: in the webcomic Jeongnyeon has a girlfriend, Kwon Bu-yong (the rightmost figure in the webcomic image below), who starts out as a fan of Maeran. There’s also a side character who was disrespected as a woman and decided to henceforth live life as a man. Neither are present in the TV series.

Nevertheless, Jeongnyeon is still of interest to yuri fans who enjoy dramas about the theater in general and all-female theatrical troupes in particular. And there is plenty of drama to be had: Jeongnyeon finds her quest to become a top star impeded by the violent opposition of her mother Seo Yong-re (Moon So-ri), who has a mysterious past and a hidden connection to Maeran’s imperious director Kang So-bok (Ra Mi-ran). She also finds herself beset by bullies, incurring the wrath of director Kang for various offenses, and enmeshed in a triangle of sorts with her rival would-be prince Heo Yeong-seo (Shin Ye-eun) and their would-be princess Hong Joo-ran (Woo Da-vi). Meanwhile, scandals past and present threaten the positions of current prince Moon Ok-gyeong (Jung Eun-chae) and her princess Seo Hye-rang (Kim Yoon-hye), and the future of Maeran and indeed gukgeuk as a whole hangs in the balance.

The yuri elements discarded in the transition to screen reappear elsewhere as subtext: Ok-gyeong has the transmasc aura of the previous side character and with Hye-rang forms the troupe’s resident couple: They live in the same house, are casually affectionate with one another, and are even raising a young girl together. With Bu-yong absent, the show’s focus is solely on the Maeran trainees, and Joo-ran becomes a (very) thinly-veiled love interest for Jeongnyeong. Finally, in a rare example of heterosexual erasure, Yeong-seo loses the boyfriend she had in the webcomic and is free to devote her attentions to Jeongnyeon and Joo-ran. Almost all the remaining men have only minor roles or function as obstacles to the core group of women; the only other men featured, Jeongnyeon’s father and grandfather, are dead as her story begins.

As a show considered on its own merits, Jeongnyeon has a uniformly excellent cast, high production values, and a compelling if often bittersweet plot. Kim Tae-ri, who first came to fame starring in the Korean lesbian drama The Handmaiden, studied pansori for multiple years in preparation for the part, and it shows. I thought she played the role of Jeongnyeon a bit too broadly in some early episodes, but otherwise she’s completely convincing. Shin Ye-eun takes a common trope—the hard-working performer who’s overshadowed by an untutored genius—and makes Yeong-seo a complex and compelling rival to Jeongnyeon. Finally, Woo Da-vi is unjustly neglected in the show’s promotional materials, but her character is the emotional heart of the series. Joo-ran’s scenes with Jeongnyeon are some of the show’s most affecting, and certainly the most romantic.

As a story, Jeongnyeon harks back to Hana Monogatari and other “S” fictions, in which young women have relationships of “passionate friendship” (and sometimes more than friendship) with other young women, relationships ended by adulthood and (typically arranged) marriages. Gukgeuk itself lost its mass audience to television and its elite audience to Western opera (exemplified by Yeong-seo’s mother, a famous soprano who looks down on Yeong-seo’s chosen career). So, even if other events didn’t intrude, the time the characters would have with each other would be fleeting.

As a production, Jeongnyeon was created in a modern society marked by often violent misogyny and homophobia, and can be seen as a response to that. The series was written and directed by women, and its main cast are all women. The women in Jeongnyeon start and staff their own troupes and put on their own theatrical productions. They claim for themselves ownership of stories that are classics of Korean culture and sing in a style originally pioneered by men, a style that in its frequent harshness is the very opposite of the ultra-feminine stylings of the stereotypical present-day idol.

While yuri fans have bemoaned the changes made in the transition from webcomic to live-action, the mainstream South Korean audience has taken this example of “quiet feminism” to heart and propelled the show to high ratings and the number 1 position in its time slots. If Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born is anywhere near as popular outside South Korea—as it deserves to be—perhaps one day there’ll be an official English release of the webcomic, and we can experience the story of Jeongnyeon as it was originally conceived.

Ratings:

Story — 7 (a bit too much coincidence in the initial setup, and a somewhat flat ending)
Characters — 9 (complex characters vividly brought to life)
Production — 9 (impressive recreations of multiple theatrical productions)
Service — 1 (Ok-gyeong in a suit and fedora counts, I think)
Yuri — 5 (the subtext is strong with this one)

Overall — 8 (a kiss apparently left on the cutting-room floor might have made this a 9)

Yuri fans who can look past the (self-)censorship of a canon yuri story will find an entertaining and emotionally resonant drama elevated by standout performances by Kim Tae-ri and the other leads, along with splendid recreations of classic gukgeuk performances.

Note: If you want to further explore the real-life history of all-female theater in Korea, see Ha Ju-yong, “Female Masculinity and Cultural Symbolism: A History of Yeoseong gukgeuk, the All-Female Cast Theatrical Genre,” The Review of Korean Studies 24, no. 2 (December 2021), 107-144, doi: 10.25024/review.2021.24.2.107. This open-access article has a wealth of detail, including promotional posters and ads, photographs of performers, and even example sheet music for one of the songs.