“The subject is certainly worth exploring, though it's hardly conventional musical material...The young cast's relative inexperience is at times glaringly obvious...Like watching a competent college production...Generic musical-theater idiom in their score...Melodramatic book...This banal and forgettable musical leaves you thinking less about the historical atrocities it dramatizes than about how much more illuminating a Wikipedia page on the subject would be.”
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"Trying to portray the violence subtly, an oxymoronic idea, blunts viewers from the horror of experiencing the victims' pain and also limits their sympathy...The music has a sameness making you wonder why this disturbing story must even include music...On the upside, the large cast offers roles to many talented Asian actors...Unfortunately, this lightweight production and musical score does not come close to packing the necessary emotional and dramatic punch."
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"In telling the rest of this shattering story, the creators of 'Comfort Women,' inexplicably, rely heavily on musical theater conventions that result in wrongheaded, if not downright offensive, choices. The most cringeworthy is the choreographed sequence of a Korean woman being gang raped by Japanese soldiers. At some point, in their effort to visualize this atrocity, director Dimo Hyun Jun Kim and choreographer Natanal Hyun Kim should have realized that they were, in fact, trivializing it."
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“The production shows a noteworthy attention to detail...The scenes of sexual assault are delicately handled, depicted through interpretive dance...Although the show gets off to a rough start, these young actors eventually prove their depth (though some are stronger than others)...Too many songs, that at times one seems to blur into the next, but overall the production is strong with varied and compelling characters, beautiful lyrics, and quality stage combat.”
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"The current revival of 'Comfort Women' is difficult to watch, think about, and certainly sing about...It’s hard to imagine that a tragedy of this depth and these dimensions could be regarded as the basis for entertainment. Good intentions are not enough. Everything has to have artistic coherence...It just didn’t work for me...All I could think of during and since the play was the horror the women suffered. This subject needs to be shown, not in a musical, but as a film documentary."
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"'Comfort Women: A Musical' is poised to take its place in musical theatre history besides iconic shows like 'Miss Saigon' and 'Les Miserables'. All these shows tell the story of people who have fallen (or, more accurately, have been pushed down) by the wayside of war but are nevertheless important and deserve to be heard...The choreography is imaginative and fantastic...Highly recommended."
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"A regrettable misfire...The scattershot sequence of scenes is often weakly integrated, and long, static passages with little dramatic progress are frequent…A superior score would have helped, but…the music is barely tuneful…Too many lyrics are bogged down in clunky, pompous verbosity…Perhaps the greatest problem is the cast, an eager but largely inexperienced…group of young actors who appear more like a group of college students than a company of professionals."
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“Although some of the text is drawn out, the overall production is dramatically moving, as the important concept is fleshed out by an excellent cast...One comes away appreciative of all the work that has gone into ‘Comfort Women’, and even if it hardly rises to the level of a great musical, it boasts a reasonably good score and is indeed often moving, enlightening and dramatic in remembering the sad fate of so many Korean women who fell prey to the Imperial Japanese Army."
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