[REVIEW] SBS TV series "The Musical" - Friday 9:55 p.m.

Scene from SBS TV series "The Musical" [SBS]

SBS TV series "The Musical" - Friday 9:55 p.m.
A spirited medical school student who dreams of becoming a musical actor, the composer-music director for musicals who discovers her talent and the chief of a production company who considers musicals and the divas of musicals as money. The characters to "The Musical," created from within the structure of a musical, are typical. Of course, not to say that typical is bad. A drama can be considered to have a strong basis or turn into a cliche project depending on what can be pulled out of that standardness. Yet sadly, the first episode of "The Musical" showed the drama may be the latter. So little was the drama interested in the passion Go Eun-bi (Ku Hye-sun) had of musicals that the effort she put in for a year to pursue her dream of doing musicals was shown merely through a subtitle saying, 'A year later.' And set aside how naive she is, enough to believe her trickster teacher Sa Bok-ja (Park Kyung-lim) who is funny to an uncomfortable extent, the fact that the incidents that followed after contained no stories and were used merely as tools to show her do a costume play, can only be called lackadaisical.

More than anything, there are no musicals in the drama. The only scene that is worthy of being called a musical in the first episode was when the main female character imagined an embarrassing moment of herself on stage. This means that 'musical,' the only keyword that links these characters, must be significant in their own way but they were typical in this sense as well. Composer Hong Jae (Choi Daniel), has lost all hopes for musicals, musical diva Bae Kang-hee (Ock Ju-hyeon) is self-centered and to investor Yoo Jin (Park Ki-woong), musicals means nothing more than numbers. Amidst all this, all the characters in this drama, including Eun-bi, who love musicals, have passion but no talent. The scene where famed musical numbers are repeated, as if the songs are everything to musicals, shows that the drama is not good enough to contain a story that is worthy of the show being called by the name of its genre. The moment that "This is the Moment" from musical "Jekyll & Hyde" becomes a tool to show off the diva's singing capabilities, there is no longer a musical. A musical drama without a musical is nothing.

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