With the new musical Kpop, opening November 27 at Circle in the Square Theatre, Helen Park becomes Broadway’s first Asian American woman composer and only the sixth Asian composer of a Broadway show.
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 eventually heard about NYU’s graduate musical-theater-writing program and figured she could at least learn the craft of songwriting and storytelling. “Since thatexperience, 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.
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