Shin Choon-soo, chief executive and producer of OD Company who has been active on Broadway, will unveil "Wuthering Heights," a new musical aimed at the global market, in January. It is his first global project in three years, following "The Great Gatsby," which opened on Broadway in 2024.

OD Company said at a news conference at SKY31 in Lotte World Tower on the 3rd that the original musical "Wuthering Heights" will have its world premiere at the CJ Towol Theater of the Seoul Arts Center from Jan. 26 to Feb. 28 next year. The production is a new adaptation by a Korean creative team of the novel by British author Emily Brontë.

"I remember staying up all night, overwhelmed with emotion, after reading the work as a middle school student," Shin said. "Turning such a well-known classic into a musical does carry some pressure, but I chose it because the source material is so compelling — it is hard to find a story this absorbing, with such deep interior lives and narrative power."

The production goes beyond the love and revenge between Heathcliff and Catherine that form the core of the novel, extending into the tragedy and passion carried on by the next generation. Where previous films and stage works focused mainly on the love, conflict and revenge surrounding Heathcliff, Catherine and Catherine's brother, this production widens the story to ask how the wounds of the parents' generation affect the one that follows.

Notably, one actor plays both Catherine and her daughter, portraying a figure who witnesses and consoles Heathcliff's loneliness and madness. "It poses a fundamental question about whether the wounds left by the parents' generation and the cycle of destructive revenge carry on into the next," Shin said.

Another distinguishing feature is that Korean creators led the development of the work. "I believed that the delicate emotional shading characteristic of Korean creative teams, and a musical language that maximizes narrative, could bring out the explosive energy of the original," Shin said. The book and lyrics are by Han Jae-eun, known for the musicals "Fan Letter" and "Time of Dogs and Cats," with music by Jo Woo-in, who composed the scores for "Nambeol" and "SPECIAL S."

Joining them are Michael Fentiman, a director who has worked in London's West End, and Jason Howland, an arranger active on Broadway. Howland is also known as the composer of the Korean original musical "Swing Days: Codename A." OD Company plans to present the work to Korean audiences first before taking it overseas. Specific overseas performance schedules and destinations have not yet been confirmed.

Shin has expanded his presence in the global musical market since bringing "The Great Gatsby" to Broadway in 2024. "The Great Gatsby" is still running on Broadway in an open-ended engagement, and has drawn about 1 million theatergoers and recorded about 200 billion won ($136 million) in revenue through its Broadway run and North American tour.

High production and operating costs mean the show has yet to break even. "Musicals are a genre where you can only turn a profit by sustaining performances over the long term through open-ended runs and tours," Shin said, stressing that productions must be developed and managed with a long-term view. The plan for "Wuthering Heights" is likewise to build competitiveness in the global market through continued performances rather than short-term box-office success. (Lee Hye-jin)

From The Korea Herald:

Producer Shin Chun-soo took “The Great Gatsby” from its 2024 Broadway premiere to London and Seoul. His next musical, another classic novel adaptation developed alongside “Gatsby,” carries the same global ambition but reverses the route.

“Wuthering Heights,” based on Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, will have its world premiere in Seoul in January, rather than in London, as Shin had once considered.

The 58-year-old veteran producer told reporters Tuesday that he decided to bet on a Korean writer and composer — and on Korean audiences, whom he described as deeply engaged and discerning.

“I really wanted this one to have its world premiere in Seoul,” he said. “I hoped to show it to these audiences first, then take it out to the world.”

The decision comes as “Gatsby” gives Shin a footing few Korean producers have had on Broadway. [...]

With “Wuthering Heights,” he has put a Korean writer and composer at the center, joined by Korean designers and an international team that is largely British.

“With ‘Gatsby,’ I read the English script and the translated script over and over, and fighting over every single line was really hard,” Shin said. “Working with Korean writers, the density of the story and the detail of the emotions really pile up. That is the solid core of this piece.”

The book and lyrics are by Han Jae-eun, known for intimate musicals “Fan Letter” and “It Rains Cats and Dogs.” The score is by Cho Woo-in, a classically trained composer who studied at Hanyang University and in US. Cho is not yet a mainstream name, but Shin said he recognized the Korean composer’s musicality long ago, and the two writers have been developing the show together since 2020.

Costume designer Kim Hwan, who works in Germany, and makeup designer Kim Nam-sun round out the Korean side. They are joined by British director Michael Fentiman, choreographer Alexzandra Sarmiento, set designer Max Jones and lighting designer Tim Lutkin, who designed “Life of Pi.” Jason Howland, who composed “Gatsby,” is the music supervisor and orchestrator.

Shin is also bringing a Broadway-style development process to a Korean stage. Most productions, he said, move quickly from setup to previews to opening night, leaving little time to fix what does not work.

For “Wuthering Heights,” OD Company has rented the 1,004-seat CJ Towol Theater for three months, though the show will run for only five weeks. The rest of the time goes to setup, technical and dress rehearsals and closed previews. (Park Ga-young)

We are not leaving the stages in Asia yet, as China Daily reports that a Huju opera called Moonlight Shadow is based on Jane Eyre.

The polished revised edition of Huju opera Moonlight Shadow, produced by the Shanghai Changning District Huju Opera Heritage Preservation Center, premiered on Tuesday night at the Hongqiao Art Center.

It adapts Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre into a Shanghai folk-opera performed in Shanghainese, the intangible cultural heritage that bears distinctive Haipai cultural genes.

Belonging to Huju's iconic "suit-and-cheongsam" drama genre, the story is reset in early‑20th‑century Shanghai, a city deeply embedded in the Jiangnan cultural sphere. It traces orphan governess Feng Mingyue and Lu Peiyan, master of Linhu Manor. The pair goes through conflicts and misunderstandings before developing a sincere love built on mutual dignity and equality. The adaptation preserves the spiritual core of the original novel while infusing strong regional Shanghai and Jiangnan artistic charm.

Helmed by Yi Tianfu, professor at Shanghai Theatre Academy, this upgraded version comes four years after its 2022 debut. National first-class actor Wang Bin takes on the role of Lu, while Zhu Zhen — the city's young Huju-opera intangible-cultural-heritage inheritor — plays heroine. The cast has refined vocal tunes, stage visuals, and character interactions to achieve more nuanced psychological expression.

"Onstage, every gesture, glance, and pause must convey unspoken inner thoughts, rather than merely reciting lines," Wang said. "For this revival, we have dug far deeper into subtle, progressive emotional shifts between our two characters to avoid flat performances."

Zhu pointed out the real-world dilemma facing Shanghainese inheritance. "Many young Shanghai residents can understand the dialect, yet feel too shy to speak it," she said. "Live theater gives us a vivid, public channel to hand down this precious linguistic heritage to younger generations." (Zheng Yiran)

   

A new edition of Eva Figes's 1977 retelling of Wuthering Heights from Nelly's point of view was published a few weeks ago:

Nelly's Version

by Eva Figes

Introduction by Susan Faludi

Dalkey Archive Press

Paperpack: 9781628976618

eBook: 9781628976625

Publication Date: August 16th, 2026

Eva Figes' inventive reshaping of the psychological thriller, Nelly's Version—part dark comedy, part mystery novel—offers an unsettling journey into the mind of a witty woman stuck in a pastless present.

A middle-aged woman suffering from amnesia checks into a small-town hotel under the pseudonym Nelly Dean with a suitcase full of cash and no idea where it, or she, came from. Distrustful of everyone from the waiter who serves her lunch to the store clerk who claims to know her from grade school, Nelly fears she is part of a conspiracy. At the same time, however, she remains strangely indifferent to the clues that might explain her puzzling circumstances and is unaffected by the many assaults, robberies, arsons, and other crimes occurring around her.

Named after the housekeeper in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Nelly Dean is an endearingly unhinged character who will fascinate and excite readers in this deranged literary thriller, featuring an introduction by Susan Faludi.

   

St John the Baptist Church in Tunstall, located in North Lancashire and famed for its links to the Brontë sisters, hopes to raise the funds for specialist conservation of its windows, stonework and parapets.

A recent survey found that several stained glass windows are in urgent need of repair, including those depicting Joan of Arc, St George, and St Michael. [...]

The Grade I listed church was attended by the Brontë sisters during their time at school in nearby Cowan Bridge and later appeared as Brocklebridge Church in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. (Sonia Veneziani-Rocha)

   

A Wuthering Heights fae romantasy. Of course it is.

Lord of the Heights. A Wuthering Heights Fae Romantasy

Scarlett J. Thorne

CAEZIK - Showrunner Press

ISBN: 9781647102074 (paperback)

October 29, 2026

Booklist calls Lord of the Heights "a dangerously romantic journey" and says Scarlett J. Thorne takes "classic gothic romance to new heights....dark retelling with a searing love story that fans of Rebecca Yarros, Rachel Gillig, and Sarah J. Maas will devour."

The moors do not forget. They hunger.

James Lockwood came to Yorkshire looking for silence. Instead, a storm kills his car, the road vanishes, and Wuthering Heights opens its door as if it has been expecting him.

Nelly Dean knows why he has come. Behind the stone walls waits the true story of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff: a girl with fire in her blood, a boy carried home in a storm, a blood oath carved between worlds, and a love fierce enough to tear the veil apart.

This is Wuthering Heights reimagined as dark gothic fae romantasy: haunted moors, ancient bargains, a sentient manor, ghosts that are never only ghosts, and a romance as dangerous as it is unforgettable.

Catherine tried to seal away her magic by choosing a mortal life. Heathcliff returns as something older and darker than the orphan the world remembers. As the solstice nears, the past begins repeating, and Lockwood must decide whether this house is asking him to witness a tragedy or help break the curse.

A standalone gothic fantasy romance for readers who want classic atmosphere, fae magic, morally gray obsession, and a haunted love story that chooses healing over revenge.

One manor. One curse. One chance to break it.

   

Maas and co are clearly wonderful, almost psychic conjurors and entertainers, but they are no Charlotte Brontë or Edith Wharton, authors who gripped and entranced me in my own turbulent, disillusioned and yes, "heteropessimist" early days.

Of course people should enjoy and consume romantasy if that's what fires them up. And no wonder that it does: the genre is, at heart, both crude and obvious, which chimes perfectly with the sensibilities of the social-media age. But I can't help but feel that its rise marks both the end of the heyday of English literature, and perhaps of maturity itself. (Zoe Strimpel)

Ten of us are on two long rectangular tables set side by side –a bookshop owner, a chef, a snowboarding instructor, a wildlife conservationist, a Wall Street banker turned photographer, a retired Indian Administrative Services officer, a therapist, two writers and a librarian. We are trying to understand this complicated poem, this pastiche of memoir, of descriptions of the landscape, of dreams and an obsession with Emily Brontë. [...]

Running through these landscapes of grief and loneliness, is our narrator’s obsession with Emily Brontë whose collected works she carries around with her. The fifth Brontë sibling, a motherless girl who wrote poetry and but one novel – Wuthering Heights, which was published when she was 29. A year later, she was dead.

“Emily Brontë was good at cursing”, our poem’s narrator tells us.

Elsewhere she puzzles “How did Emily come to lose faith in humans?”

What did Emily know of evil and heartbreak? How could she write poetry and a novel like Wuthering Heights, so full of savagery and passion? Our narrator wonders.

Sitting at the table, we are trying to make sense of these interwoven worlds as well.

“What do the ‘hanged puppies’ in the poem mean?” the snowboard instructor says.

“It’s a line from Wuthering Heights,” someone replies.

“But hanging puppies-why?” the chef says.

“Emily Brontë was an animal lover, maybe that’s her way of showing villainy and the wildness in human nature, to have characters like Hareton and Heathcliff hanging puppies,” I say. I have wondered about this myself earlier and, naturally, have already researched it online.

Someone orders a black bean burger, someone else an avocado sandwich. The food arrives, the bread is broken and passed around. The conversation flows on, drifting through Brontë’s dark moors, Carson’s dreams and her grief, and back into our own lives.

I look at my watch. Somehow, three hours have passed. (Sonya Dutta Choudhury)