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Musical theater has a long history of successful productions that at first glance don't seem particularly fun or uplifting—consider Oliver!'s homeless orphans in Dickensian London, or The Sound of Music's Von Trapp family harmonizing its way out of Nazi-occupied Austria. But in Seoul, novice theater director Jung Sung San is pushing the concept of the unlikely musical to a new extreme. Jung, 36, currently has a cast in rehearsal for a musical about the prison camps of North Korea.

Called Yodok Story, the production is set in one of the most notorious of dictator Kim Jong Il's gulags, which alone houses an estimated 20,000 prisoners, including many jailed for what Pyongyang deems political crimes. If you've heard of Yodok, that's because it has already gained a good deal of international infamy. One of Yodok's former inmates, Kang Chol Hwan, a North Korean defector now living in Seoul, wrote a harrowing memoir (The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag) about his imprisonment there as a young boy. The book was translated into English, and Kang ended up in Washington last year chatting about his incarceration with an unexpected soul mate: U.S. President George W. Bush.

There's no shortage of literature about gulag life, of course. But a musical? A rehearsal in Seoul earlier this month confirmed suspicions that Jung, who defected to South Korea from the North in 1994, is not looking to delight audiences with the kind of toe-tapping jollity dished up on Broadway: while a patriotic North Korean song blared in the background, a dozen actors playing prison guards marched menacingly in goosestep around three Yodok inmates caught trying to escape. Jung, who says his father was publicly executed in one of Kim's camps, intends to play things straight. The story, which Jung himself wrote, is nothing if not realistic, which is to say it's about as grim as can be. It revolves around a 26-year-old dancer imprisoned along with her family after her father is accused of spying for South Korea's National Intelligence Service. She's raped by a prison warden, finds herself pregnant, falls in love with a guard, then realizes her situation is hopeless and attempts suicide—a punishable crime in North Korea. The guard attempts to rescue her from solitary confinement, but fails and is executed for betraying the state. Other than that, everyone lives happily ever after.

Jung, who says he tried to kill himself by slitting his wrist after learning of his father's death, explains that his goal in producing Yodok is "to let people know about human-rights abuses in North Korea in an unconventional way." That would be simple enough, were his message not complicated by politics. For several years, the international community has been trying desperately to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear-weapons program. South Korea's strategy has been to engage the isolated country economically and diplomatically, so Jung's production was never destined to win official favor. Indeed, Jung says he has been pressured by South Korean government officials on at least three occasions to tone down the play over concerns that it conflicts with the government's efforts to improve relations with North Korea. He claims the officials advised him to characterize life in the camp as less brutal and asked him to remove a number of key props, including the North's flags and images of Kim and his late father Kim Il Sung. Jung declines to say who the officials were or which ministry they came from.

Jung says he's resisted the pressure and has made no changes to his production. Still, the heat caused some of his financing to dry up, forcing him to raise additional funds in a rather unorthodox manner: in return for a loan of about $20,000 from one backer, he says, he put his kidney—yes, his kidney—up as collateral.

Pressure or no pressure, Yodok will open in Seoul in mid-March, Jung says, adding that he expects it to be a commercial success: "I believe South Koreans do care and are interested in prison camps." So optimistic is he, in fact, that Yodok, the musical, is the first part of a planned trilogy. And after that, who knows: perhaps a song-and-dance version of the six-party talks?

• Bill Powell
• A novice theater director risks government wrath with a song-filled play about a North Korean gulag