Navigating the National and the Global: The Last Empress, the Musical

This chapter discusses how The Last Empress (a musical based on the 1895 Japanese assassination of Queen Min, the last empress of Korea’s Chosun Dynasty) embodies the vision of contemporary South Korean cultural politics that was embedded in the mid-1990s propagandistic slogan of segyehwa (globalization). As a part of a national project to promote traditional Korean culture abroad, the pageantry of this play, which includes extravagant staging and a shamanistic ritual, was explicitly designed to captivate Broadway audiences. The chapter questions the ways that a South Korean theatre producer’s adamant commitment to the nation’s cultural development manifests in this musical production.