Musical Mata Hari’s 3-story stage overwhelms in scale

“The stage has overwhelmed the musical itself.”

Musical "Mata Hari" has become a hot topic of conversation in the performing art community these days due to its overwhelmingly huge stage set and mechanism.

The stage set for Mata Hari is massive, as it amounts to a volume equivalent to 78 units of 5-ton truck in total. The construction of the stage cost about 10 billion won (87 million U.S. dollars), or 80 percent of the musical’s total production budget that amounts to 12.5 billion won (10.87 million dollars). The expense amounts to three times "The Elizabeth," which reportedly cost the most in stage construction among the previous musicals that have been staged by EMK Musical Company, the producer of Mata Hari.

The most important sets among stage facilities for Mata Hari are "Moulin Rouge" and the execution site. “We worked so hard to set up ‘Moulin Rouge,’ which was the stage of Mata Hari’s life in addressing the emotions of her life and character, and the execution site, the stage for her death,” said Oh Pil-young, who designed the stage setup for the work.

The three-story structured "Moulin Rouge" that showcases the dancer Mata Hari’s glaring life is the very stage that is representing the musical. The set that reinstates the balconied theater for Moulin Rouge consists of 14 cylinder-shape structures, each measuring 2.5 meters across and 7.7 meters long. Half of the cylinders are described as seats at the balcony in the theater decorated with glaring lighting, while the other side displays battlefields of soldiers, to give the sense of a twist.

The set of the execution site in which Mata Hari stands alone in the first scene in Part 1, and the last scene in Part 2 takes the shape of three-dimensional path, which gets increasingly narrower toward the rear section of the stage. It is a presentation of Oh’s idea that the scene describes the situation wherein Mata Hari reflects her life at the moment of her death. The set for the execution site has reinstated a sense of three-dimensional depth by making most of the Blue Square Samsung Electronics Hall with a stage that measures 23 meters in depth.

Mata Hari presents 52 switching of scenes in total by utilizing such sets. The stage director places as many as 195 cue signs in total to switch stage sets during the running time that is close to three hours. Unlike the practice in ordinary musical works in which the "crew" staffers manually move the stage set, the stage for Mata Hari is operated automatically with 29 automation devices.

김정은기자 kimje@donga.com