Thrill Me: Queerness, Spectatorship, and the Utopian Performative in South Korean Musical Theatre.

This article examines the South Korean remounting of the off-Broadway musical *Thrill Me: The Leopold & Loeb Story* (2007) to explore how transnational musical theatre reflects shifting perceptions of queer identity within South Korea. It highlights how the production, featuring two cisgender male performers portraying queer characters, attracted predominantly cisgender female audiences who engaged with the show as a "utopian performative," enabling them to negotiate their marginalized social positions through identification with ambiguously marked queer male subjects. The adaptation strategically obscured explicit markers of queerness and violence, facilitating audience empathy while commodifying queer identity within South Korea's commercial musical theatre industry. The article situates *Thrill Me* as a pivotal work that influenced South Korean musical theatre conventions, including the cultivation of revolving-door female audiences and the incorporation of Boys' Love (BL) aesthetics, thereby creating a culturally specific space where queer discourse is both reified and reimagined amid prevailing heteronormative and patriarchal norms.