Dear Playwright: Team America is not Kim Jong Il's first foray into musical drama.

• Author: Gorenfeld, John
• Position: Biography

SHORTLY BEFORE appearing as the villain in the marionette comedy Team America: World Police, Kim Jong Il, the self-proclaimed Dear Leader of North Korea, revealed that he possesses nuclear weapons. That makes him the most heavily armed drama critic in the world. The chubby dictator, who has threatened to submerge his neighbors in a "sea of fire," was just as unsparing in his assessment of 400 years of musical theater in his 1974 tract On the Art of Opera: Talk to Creative Workers in the Field of Art and Literature, available stateside from the University Press of the Pacific.

On the Art of Opera describes how Kim and his dad, the late Great Leader Kim Il Sung, discovered the husk of a tired art form and gave it a much-needed shot of North Korean commUnism. Any impartial observer would agree that Kim's aesthetic prescriptions are every bit as crowd-pleasing as his economic policies.

"In conventional operas," Kim writes, "the personalities of the characters were abstract, their acting clumsy, and the flow of the drama tedious, because the singers were forced to sing unnaturally and their acting was neglected." Furthermore, until the arrival of the Kims, "no one interwove dance and story very closely."

And now? "The 'Sea of Blood'-style opera," he observes, "has opened up a new phase in dramaturgy." In case you've been living in a cave, Sea of Blood is North Korea's longest-running production, the Cats of Pyongyang. It has been staged 1,500 times, according to the official Korea News Service, which calls it an "immortal classical masterpiece." Kim claims to have revamped the form by chucking the aria out the window and replacing all solo performance with a cunning Kim innovation: the pangchang, a more satisfying off-stage chorus representing groupthink.

The critic's other major work--1973's On the Art of the Cinema, also available from the University Press of the Pacific--offers a blueprint for a Communist movie industry, to be run under the "monolithic guidance" of the Party.

In the 1970s, Kim Il Sung put his playboy son in charge of North Korean culture, sort of an apprenticeship before taking charge of the entire society. As part of his duties, the young administrator personally orchestrated not only the 1983 bombing of South Korean officials in Rangoon, Burma (or so the South has said), but also a number of gaudy musical productions featuring such regional hits as "I Will Remain Loyal" and "Avenge the 'Punitive Expedition.'" He was known...