Why Korea Can't Let Go of the Musical Built on Kim Kwang-seok's Songs

Some musicals run for a single season and quietly disappear. And then there are shows like Those Days — the Korean jukebox musical built around the songs of legendary folk singer Kim Kwang-seok — which just entered its seventh season on stage with more than 600 total performances behind it and no visible sign of slowing down.

Currently running through August 23 at the Dicube Link Art Center in Seoul's Guro district, the production has spent over a decade proving that Kim Kwang-seok's songs — beloved across generations for their warmth, melancholy, and plainspoken honesty — belong as much on a stage as on a record. And this season, thanks to a pair of special television appearances by cast members on KBS's long-running music competition program Immortal Songs, the show has found itself at the center of a broader cultural moment around the singer's enduring legacy.

A Cold War Spy Thriller Built on Folk Songs

The premise of Those Days sounds almost too clever on paper: two Blue House presidential bodyguards, Jung-hak and Moo-young, are assigned a top-secret protection mission in 1992, just before Korea's historic normalization of diplomatic relations with China. On the day the agreement is signed, their ward — a mysterious woman — and Moo-young vanish without a trace. Three decades later, a now-senior Jung-hak receives word that the president's daughter has disappeared with her own bodyguard, and finds himself retracing the steps of that long-ago mystery.

The two timelines — 1992 and 2022 — run in parallel throughout the show, each filled with Kim Kwang-seok's iconic catalog. Songs like Around Thirty, A Private's Letter, and Though I Loved You don't function merely as atmospheric backdrop. Director and writer Jang Yu-jeong, whose credits include beloved Korean musicals Finding Mr. Destiny and Brothers Were Brave, builds the music into the fabric of each scene, allowing a familiar melody to carry emotional weight that dialogue sometimes cannot.

The current seventh season features twelve cast members rotating through the lead roles. Eom Ki-joon, Ryu Soo-young, Choi Jin-hyuk, and Kim Jung-hyun share the role of the principled Jung-hak; Park Kyu-won, Yoon Si-yoon, B1A4's Sanduel, and Yoo Seon-ho play the free-spirited Moo-young; and Lee Ji-soo and Park Sae-him portray the woman at the center of the mystery. Veterans Seo Hyun-chul, Lee Jeong-yeol, and Go Chang-suk round out the cast in supporting roles including the Blue House operations manager. Fans of different cast combinations have their own viewing preferences, a testament to how well the production holds up across wildly different performer interpretations of the same roles.

The Wizard of Oz Hidden Inside a Presidential Bodyguard Story

For audiences willing to pay close attention, Director Jang has embedded layers of symbolic meaning throughout the production — some hiding in plain sight. In one of the show's most tender scenes, the three leads improvise a private cinema in the Blue House VIP guest hall, watching The Wizard of Oz together.

The choice turns out to be far from arbitrary. The mysterious translator at the center of the story — a woman who spends her life giving voice to others while carrying her own deep interior silence, shaped by a childhood experience of selective mutism — mirrors Dorothy's companions in ways that become clearer the more you think about them. As Jang has explained in interviews, the Scarecrow who wants a brain, the Lion who wants courage, and the Tin Man who wants a heart are all characters defined by what they lack. "The three leads, like those characters, carry their absences with them," she said. "And through their connection with each other, they find their way forward."

Even the score accompanying that scene was chosen with deliberate care. Jang eventually settled on the Japanese song "Cerise no Kisetsu" — a piece carrying bittersweet nostalgia — layered with the Oz imagery, evoking the same longing and hope that runs through Kim Kwang-seok's catalog. "Over the Rainbow," she noted, shares the emotional core that defines the entire production: yearning for a world that feels perpetually just out of reach.

When the Cast Brought Their Songs to National Television

For Korean audiences, the connection between Those Days and Kim Kwang-seok came into sharp focus this month when five cast members appeared on episode 763 of KBS 2TV's Immortal Songs, in a special episode called "The Day We Sing Together" — a title that unmistakably echoes the musical's own name.

Sanduel (B1A4), Lee Ji-soo, Kim Jung-hyun, Choi Jin-hyuk, and Park Kyu-won all performed Kim Kwang-seok's songs in what became a warmly emotional evening of television. Backstage footage captured the cast at their most unguarded. Go Chang-suk — who plays the Blue House kitchen manager in the musical — gleefully informed viewers that the ensemble skips vocal warm-ups before shows in favor of push-ups, then aimed specifically at Choi Jin-hyuk and Kim Jung-hyun for their enviable physiques. Sanduel, a six-time winner on the program, issued what amounted to a formal declaration of competitive intent toward his co-stars: "Let me show you what it really means to be cocky." Kim Jung-hyun, appearing as a competitive singer for the very first time in his career, quietly admitted he was more nervous than he let on — only for Sanduel to immediately and confidently counter that the concern was unnecessary.

Earlier in the year, on March 14, the program staged a broader 30th anniversary tribute to Kim Kwang-seok, bringing together artists including Seo Eun-kwang (BTOB), Jeon Yu-jin, Forestella, Kim Dong-jun, and others. Kim Dong-jun won the episode with his rendition of A Private's Letter, deploying the entire ensemble from his current musical production in what the show's host described as a concert-scale performance. Together, the two episodes formed a kind of double tribute: one looking at the singer's legacy through the broader landscape of artists shaped by his music, and one seeing it through performers who live with those songs every night on stage.

The Bodyguards Who Train Like Every Day Might Be Their Last

Perhaps the most talked-about element of the current run is the show's ensemble cast, nicknamed "근날들" by devoted fans — a portmanteau combining the Korean word for "muscle" and the musical's title. These performers execute elaborate martial arts sequences each night, including taekwondo, kendo, and acrobatics, creating the kind of physical spectacle that gives big-theater musicals their sense of something genuinely impossible.

But Director Jang has always insisted these sequences carry meaning beyond their surface excitement. While researching the show, she interviewed actual Presidential Security Service officers, and one answer stayed with her: "We always look clean because today might be the day we die." That sentence became the invisible subtext beneath the production's most beloved crowd-pleasing moment — the Act 2 shower scene, where the bodyguards laugh and roughhouse together after a long shift. It looks like pure warmly comedic ensemble theater. Underneath it is the weight of people who have made their peace with uncertainty.

The show's curtain call has its own reputation. Audiences who have seen Those Days tend to describe the final twenty minutes — when the cast and audience essentially turn the theater into a shared celebration — as something that has to be experienced rather than described. If you go, bringing sufficient vocal energy for the occasion is strongly recommended.

Director Jang, asked recently about the show's extraordinary longevity, offered the clearest explanation she has given: "What matters more than the subject matter is the theme. What is the story I still want to tell audiences ten years from now, twenty years from now? That question is why this musical keeps returning." Those Days runs through August 23 at Seoul's Dicube Link Art Center. Tickets are available for audiences aged 8 and above.