Actor Ivy on 'Chicago' Broadway casting: 'I dug at one well for a very long time'

After more than a decade as the most prolific Roxie Hart on the Korean stage, the singer and actor Ivy is taking the role to Broadway — and in the process, becoming the first Korean performer to lead “Chicago,” the now-classic musical, in the heart of New York.

Ivy will play Roxie at the Ambassador Theatre from Aug. 17 to Sept. 6, as the 1996 revival of the musical marks its 30th anniversary. “Chicago” is the longest-running American musical on Broadway, more than 12,000 performances deep, and has played in 38 countries to some 35 million people. A Korean actor leading such a production on Broadway is extremely rare.

“I dug at one well for a very long time, and this enormous opportunity came to me,” Ivy said at a press conference in Seoul on Tuesday, ahead of her departure for New York.

The actor first played Roxie in the Korean version of “Chicago” by domestic production house Seensee Company in 2012 and has logged close to 600 performances over six seasons since, making her, by some distance, the Korean actor most identified with the role.

Ivy is going to New York as a representative of Korea’s musical actors, she added, and feels the responsibility and the pressure that comes with it.

“For someone with a Korean accent like me to stand on that stage — even while I was auditioning, I thought the chances were almost zero,” Ivy said. “I’d more or less concluded the whole thing was impossible.”

She had been learning English for only about a year and a half before her Broadway casting, and “Chicago” is “a thoroughly American piece,” making the casting decision all the more unlikely, according to Ivy. She had even been offered the same role years earlier and waved it off, back when her English ran out after a self-introduction. She keeps calling it a miracle that it happened at all.

“When I went to New York years ago, the producer Barry Weissler said he wanted to put a Korean or Japanese actor on a Broadway stage,” said Park Myung-sung, producer and CEO of Seensee Company. “But at the time I doubted our performers could hold their own against a world-class ensemble, so I turned it down on the spot.”

“‘Chicago’ is satirical and heavy with language, and is a show that punishes anyone who can’t carry it,” Park continued. “But after I received the offer for a Korean actor on Broadway for the second time, I called Ivy in and said, this looks like the chance of a lifetime, let's take it on.”

What changed between the first and second offers was Ivy herself: the Broadway creative team had worked with Seensee Company’s actors over many seasons and knew her already, and she carried a name with Korean audiences and across the diaspora. What Park returns to, though, is not Ivy’s talent but the grind that followed — an audition every three months, solo accent and pronunciation drills and no ensemble to lean on.

“‘Chicago’ is our company’s bread and butter, so Ivy taking the stage on Broadway itself is even more meaningful,” Park said. “Whenever an original musical fails at ticket sales, we’ve always slotted ‘Chicago’ into the next season to pay off the debt, and we’ve done that for nearly 20 years now. To me the musical is a kind of treasure.”

Sending the company’s most reliable Roxie back to the source, then, had a certain logic to it.

“We couldn’t be happier that Ivy is making her Broadway debut as Roxie Hart in ‘Chicago,’” the Broadway producers of the musical said in a press release. “We’ve been impressed by her talent for years, but her dedication to relearning the entire piece in English has astonished all of us — a rare and demanding thing for any performer. We hope to see Ivy’s triple threat talents soon, and are counting the days until she takes the Ambassador stage.”

“Looking at the English script, I realized how much had been left out of the Korean version,” Ivy said. “In numbers like the matron Mama’s song, every lyric is loaded with hidden sexual metaphor, twisted in ways that made me think I never knew the piece was this racy.”

What has surprised Ivy most about the role, after all these years, is what the original language exposed.

“I have played Roxie more than anyone in Korea, so I often think my career as an actor is itself like Roxie,” she said. “And now I’ve gone all the way to the final stage of it.”

In the musical, Roxie claws her way out of a jail cell and toward stardom on nothing but ambition and a good story. The resemblance is not lost on Ivy.

“I have prepared for this role on this particular stage for a long time, so if the audience can just make out my lines and my songs — if that much gets across, I’ve decided that that will be a success,” Ivy said.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]