The Last Empress, Apollo Hammersmith, London
And never the twain shall meet
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Your support makes all the difference.They sure wore a lot of crazy headgear in 19th-century Korea. Queen Min, empress of the then-kingdom of Chosun, spends her 30-year reign in a thick braid that circles her head like an enormous coffee-cake and is hung with three Christmas-tree ornaments. King Kojong favours a sort of matador's hat turned on its side and topped with a gold TV aerial. Their little son's burden of state is made heavier by a huge container of McDonald's fries pierced with a 2ft-long chopstick. Small wonder that, when Queen Min meets two Western ladies wearing tiny confections of embroidery and ostrich plumes, she studies them keenly and says, with feeling: "I could get used to these hats."
The battalion of artists, producers and overseers (a 39-member "advisory committee") involved may charge me with cultural condescension. But while The Last Empress takes itself very seriously, it has not seriously considered the requirements of a musical. This heavily political biography is complicated, shapeless and impersonal, the few emotional moments far outweighed by nationalism and heroine-worship. "Your Highness," sings a court lady, "I wish I could be like you/ you're beautiful, a dream come true." When the queen takes French lessons, the Western teacher, prostrating herself, exclaims, "You are possibly a genius!" There are, it's true, Westerners who love abasing themselves to the leader of their sacred cult – Moonies, for example – but patrons of musicals like their characters with a bit more give and take.
We also expect, not just for moral but dramatic reasons, a show that is not a jingoistic pageant. The Japanese, with whom the Koreans make an ill-starred alliance, are here shown to be greedy, treacherous and cruel, finally assassinating the brave queen (who, 30 years on, doesn't look a day older than her wedding photo). As vindictive as it is gratuitous is the showing of a film of the US bombing of Hiroshima. The sponsoring Korea Foundation says it "endeavours to... create a better world through international understanding," but I can't see The Last Empress bringing them to their feet in Tokyo.
Hee Gap Kim's score may include chimes, cymbals and a shakuhachi, but is otherwise indistinguishable from the usual Les Mis-style soupiness and clamour. Georgina St George's task of translating the lyrics was probably impossible; the result is certainly terrible.
Tae Won Yi as the queen and Hee Jung Lee as the young king's regent have impressive, if not terribly expressive, voices; but Seung Ryong Cho, merely pudgy and plaintive as the king, seems a Cliff Richard who's got in over his head. The real star of Ho Jin Yun's production is the costume designer, Hyun Sook Kim. The rainbow-striped kimonos are what show Korea's great talent and tradition. An exhibition of them would create appreciation and good will better than this musical shotgun wedding of East and West.
To 16 Feb (0870 890 1101)
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