Cookin' With Nanta

In our quest to do all things Seoul, we stumbled upon an array of "non-speaking" theatrical performances that seem to be all the rage here.  We had our choice from a breakdancing jailbreak, to all kinds of Stomp! imitations, to what we finally settled on: Nanta.


We chose Nanta based on the fact that it is the longest running of these types of performances, and is like the father to all the ones that followed it.  That and it sounded relatively rediculous and brain numbing all at once.

So, what kind of performance is Nanta, anyway?  Well, the brochure will tell you that it's a mix between Benihana and Stomp!, which is a good "elevator pitch" for it.  That's kind of right.  In my view, it's more of a Korean-fied version of the Blue Man group.  I think the Blue Man group would be a little too esoteric for the Korean crowd, so instead, it's loosely based on the premise that there are 3 cooks assigned to cook a wedding dinner in only 2 hours.  The kicker: the kitchen manager's nephew, who is a bumbling idiot, is assigned to cook with them.  So, for those of you keeping track, the comedic elements here are: an impossible task, an impossibly short time in which to complete this task, and a bumbling fool.  As you can imagine, hilarity ensues.

Anyways, first, we have to get to the Nanta theater. And like most things in a foreign country, it's always an adventure just doing the simplest of tasks.  In our case, we wanted to take the subway to the Apgujong stop and hail a taxi to the theater.  The subway part was no problem, but getting the taxi was another.  Ok, ok, we got the taxi, but getting the driver to, you know, actually drive us to the theater was where we hit a roadblock.

We gave the driver a map and pointed to the location where we wanted to go, which had the name of the theater in English and Korean.  He still didn't know where it was, so we called the theater and gave the phone to the taxi driver.  After what seemed like a good conversation, the taxi driver turned to us and crossed his arms in an "X", the traditional Korean sign for "No".  Fine.  So we got out and hoofed it to the theater.

When we got to the theater, we saw that it was on a major intersection, and that there was a large gorilla on the outside of it.  So, yes, the taxi driver didn't know where the building with the freakin' gorilla hanging off the side of it was.  Sigh.  Note to self: learn how to say "Take me to the gorilla building" in Korean.



There's not much to comment on the show itself.  It was ok.  If you go to Korea with your gradeschool age kids, it's a nice thing to see, but you won't leave in awe or enlightened.  I did get pulled up on stage to do a dumpling making competition, though.  So, that was pretty cool.  Although, my team lost, I did get to keep the awesome paper chef's hat and was also given a Nanta cell-phone charm (it's a little thing that you hang from your cell phone. People like 'em here a lot.).



Next up on the rediculous theater list: breakdancing convicts escaping prison.  How could that not be awesome?