A smart concept and tragic premise that never quite realise their full emotional weight.
Set in the future, You & It, the London transfer of an award-winning musical from South Korea, follows two characters: Gyujin and an AI recreation of his deceased wife, Mina. At its core, this is a story about how a person learns to move forward after loss. Yet despite its tragic premise, the musical struggles to bring the audience fully into its protagonist’s emotional journey.
Much of this distance comes from the construction of the AI character. There are numerous contradictions in how she is characterised, while the audience is continually introduced to new abilities and features that have not previously been established. The AI is supposedly created with the memories, habits, appearance and personality of the original Mina, yet she seems to differ significantly from her human counterpart. She embraces new things while Gyujin clings to the past; she seeks out adventure, a trait that also seems at odds with what we are told about the original Mina. Moreover, midway through the musical, the AI begins to uncover her own history and develops something resembling an existential crisis, which arrives somewhat abruptly because the audience has never been given a clear sense of what this AI is—or is not—capable of. The rules governing the AI were more like a distraction rather than an addition to the storytelling.
The characterisation of AI Mina also weakens the musical’s exploration of grief. Throughout the piece, Gyujin repeatedly compares AI Mina with his deceased wife, but the audience has barely had the chance to know the original Mina. We see her for only a brief sequence at the very beginning of the musical, before her death in a car crash. As a result, we understand intellectually what Gyujin has lost, but it is much harder to feel the specific absence that haunts him, as the musical does not allow us to know Mina well enough to perceive the distance between her and her AI copy ourselves.
Despite these gaps in the characterisation, Zachary Pang’s performance shines through. He portrays Gyujin with amazing genuineness, warmth and credibility. He grounds the character’s grief even when the writing does not fully support him. Comparatively, Lucy Park’s (as the understudy of Mina’s character) performance feels less assured, particularly in the first half. Her voice feels only warmed up after the first half. In the latter half, she gains considerably more strength in her voice and also develops a much stronger sense of ownership over the character, allowing the AI Mina’s emerging self-crisis to appear more truthful to the audience.
Director Esther Jun and the design team do a fabulous job of bringing a story that moves between reality and memory in a sci-fi setting onto the intimate King’s Head stage. Jonathan Chan’s lighting is particularly effective, clearly distinguishing shifts in time and reality. Q Lee’s composition and lyrics, which avoids over dramatising the emotional reality of the characters yet still maintains the emotional weight, also serve the storytelling really well. You & It offers a carefully curated production by a group of highly professional creatives, yet the dramaturgical logic of the original story fails to realize the full weight of the concept it aims to achieve.
You & It will be performed at Kings Head Theatre until 26th of September 2026.