Broadway Musicals Don’t Have Asian Roles. Helen Park Is Changing That.

Hungry for Western culture after her brief stay in the States, Park convinced her parents to send her to high school in Canada, near a family friend. She landed at a conservative boarding school in small-town Alberta, where she, somewhat ironically, turned to K-pop for the comfort of home. “The school’s rules said you couldn’t listen to secular music, only Christian music—but they didn’t understand Korean,” she smiles. She listened to CDs of ’90s and early-2000s K-pop ballads on repeat and continued to write pop songs.

She eventually heard about NYU’s graduate musical-theater-writing program and figured she could at least learn the craft of songwriting and storytelling. “Since that Once Upon a Mattress experience, I was so obsessed with musical theater, but I never thought it’d be possible for me to become a composer for Broadway,” she says. “It’s a boys club. It’s rare to find women composers, period, and within that there are no Asian women.”

When Park enrolled at NYU in 2011, she was met with stereotypes and preconceptions: Her classmates were patronizing, dismissing her pop songs as just pretty and her K-pop-style writing as cute. “Words that people would never use with a male composer they would tell me without a second thought.” She was also keenly aware of being a woman in a male-dominated class. “They’d see my looks first before they could have a conversation about music and storytelling. I felt this wall between the male composers and me. And because people only saw male composers on Broadway, they never really felt the need to get to know me.” She resolved to work harder, to let her work speak for itself—and to prepare determinedly​​, should an opportunity present itself.

“For me, K-pop is a wide spectrum and communicates so many different layers of emotions” 

In 2014, shortly after graduating, the nonprofit theater Ars Nova approached Park about developing a K-pop musical. The genre was then still a bemusing curio in America, with Psy’s “Gangnam Style” a recent craze and BTS still years away from world domination. She saw a chance to change that perception. “People thought K-pop girl groups were cutesy and weird, not relatable at all, just exotic, and the boy bands were kind of feminine or so serious. I was totally in disagreement. For me, K-pop is a wide spectrum and communicates so many different layers of emotions. ‘Gangnam Style’ comments on society in a really brilliant way, but it didn’t come across to a lot of Americans. I wanted to break that stereotype and do a good job not only for myself but for K-pop and my country.”