Princess musical wins TikTok support
Author hopes her story, based on a Korean folk tale, will catch Disney’s eye
Disney has done the frozen Nordic princess, the Chinese warrior princess and many others in between. But a Korean princess? Not so much.
Harvard University student Julia Riew has set out to fix that. The 22-year-old KoreanAmerican wrote Shimcheong: A Folktale – a full-length musical inspired by a Korean folk tale with a decidedly Disney film vibe – as her final-year thesis.
She’s been releasing snippets of it on TikTok since January, and has quickly amassed a passionate following with the short videos that show her transforming into an animated Disney princess as she belts out her songs.
Riew has even sparked interest from Hollywood and theatre producers, while supporters have taken to creating visuals and animations to bring her story to life.
“It honestly still feels like I’m dreaming,” she says. “It’s been heart-warming to see the reaction, especially among the Korean-American community.”
Riew says she’s long toyed with the idea of a musical drawing from her Korean heritage but only seriously started working on it after the pandemic hit and she ended up moving back home because the Harvard campus was shut.
She admits she struggled at times to write the story and questioned if it was appropriate for her, as a third-generation KoreanAmerican, to tell it.
“There were moments where I tried to quit, when I felt like I was a fake Korean,” she says. “But I realised over the process that we can only really represent our own story, and that’s totally OK. There’s no such thing as one way to be Korean.”
Riew, who grew up in St Louis, Missouri, before her family moved to New York and then the state of Connecticut, hopes the musical follows the same trajectory as others successfully workshopped and crowdsourced on TikTok in recent years.
Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical debuted in 2020 as a benefit concert featuring Adam Lambert, Wayne Brady and other stars after the idea percolated for months on the social media platform among musical theatre fans and out-of-work performers.
Last year, the female duo known as Barlow & Bear went viral on TikTok with a song inspired by the soapy Netflix period drama Bridgerton. That led to The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical,a 15-song album now up for a Grammy – a first for a TikTok collaboration.
Riew’s musical draws on the Korean folktale The Blind Man’s Daughter, about a young woman who tries to restore her blind father’s sight but ends up in the faraway Dragon Kingdom.
In Riew’s version, the young Shimcheong spends years growing up in the magical realm before setting out on an epic journey home. Along the way, truths are revealed, obstacles are overcome and there’s no shortage of laughs and catchy songs.
If that sounds like the plot for many of Disney’s most beloved works, that’s the point, says Riew, who grew up on a steady diet of Disney and Broadway soundtracks and began writing her own songs and musicals at a young age.
“What stood out to me is that it’s a story about a young woman who goes on an adventure,” she says. “There aren’t too many stories in Korean folklore about women, especially ones where they go on adventures.”
Disney has historically struggled to reflect the diversity of its audience, falling back on stories featuring predominantly white characters and stereotypical depictions of non-white cultures, says Jana Thomas, a media and communications professor at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, who researches social media and has also written about representation in Disney films.
But the entertainment giant has responded to calls for more representative works and found success, from 2016’s Moana to Coco, Soul, Raya and the Last Dragon, and last year’s hit Encanto, she says. Turning Red, an animated film Disney’s Pixar studios due for release this month, features a teenage ChineseCanadian protagonist.
“Julia’s use of TikTok to build a fan base and attract the attention of Disney was a well-executed move,” Thomas adds. “I’d love to see Julia’s story be an example for others who want to maximise the proactive and positive power of social media.”
Spokesmen for Disney didn’t respond to an email seeking comment. But even if the film studio doesn’t come calling, Riew is optimistic Shimcheong will live on after she graduates and embarks on a career as a musical composer and lyricist.
“It seems at this point the project will be moving forward,” she says.
Putting the videos up on TikTok hasn’t just helped generate buzz for the project – it’s also helped her refine it.
Riew says she changed the character of Lotus, Shimcheong’s sidekick and the story’s comic relief, from a dragon to a gumiho – a mythical nine-tail fox in Korean folklore – based on feedback from supporters.
“It’s been reinvigorating,” she says of putting out her work to the sometimes critical eye of social media.
“It’s been eye-opening to realise how many people would love to see this come to fruition.”
It has been heart-warming to see the reaction, especially among Korean-Americans
JULIA RIEW