Case Study
The Great Gatsby — Seoul, 2025
Keyboard and playback systems for the Seoul production
100+
Performances
passed its 100th show,
closed November 9
0
SYSTEM FAILURES
across the full run
0
FAILOVER EVENTS
armed at every station
— never needed
2wks
REGISTRATION → REHEARSAL ROOM
company registered,
rig imported, built,
and delivered
01 — WHERE IT STARTED
Two weeks on Broadway, watching.
In the spring of 2024, Jay Jeong spent two weeks in New York and saw fifteen shows. Not on business — he had never experienced Broadway first-hand, and he wanted to see how its audiences, its culture, and its technology actually worked. One of those shows was The Great Gatsby, then in previews.
A year later the production came to Seoul — and the computers under the stage became Jay Jeong Productions’ first contract.
02 — THE BRIEF
The Broadway specification. Two weeks to first rehearsal.
The requirement was clear: match the Broadway production’s specification — keyboard workstations, playback, and a full backup of all of it.
The timeline was less generous. As international collaborations often go, preparation ran long, and by the time the specification was locked there were about two weeks to the first rehearsal.
In those two weeks the business was registered, equipment was ordered from Korea and abroad, and everything shipped not to an office but straight to the rehearsal room. The racks were built where the boxes were opened.
03 — THE BUILD
Nothing cut from the spec.
The system came together in the orchestra room, ran through rehearsals and the sitzprobe, and moved into the pit at GS Arts Center for tech.
One principle held throughout: nothing gets cut from the Broadway spec. The backup units were imported to the same specification as the mains — not lighter stand-ins — and every system stood behind AVR and UPS power protection.
This was also the company’s first Apple-silicon generation rig, burned in through the rehearsal-room weeks before it ever reached the pit.
04 — THE CLOSE CALL
The day the rule was written.
There was one moment worth telling. A system-setting change froze both the main and the backup machines at once — and that evening was a performance. Knowing the platform deeply meant the rig was back before the house opened. The audience never knew.
But the lesson stuck, and it became a company rule that has applied to every rig since:
Once a setup is verified, every machine’s state is locked.
Nothing changes during a run.
05 — THE RUN
A hundred nights of nothing happening.
August 1 to November 9, 2025. The run passed its hundredth performance with zero system failures. The automatic failover stood armed at every station and was never needed.
Mondays the theatre went dark; Tuesday afternoons the systems were checked. And there were more visits than the gear strictly required — because the best time to find a problem is before it exists.
The best redundancy is the kind nobody ever finds out about.
Across a hundred-plus nights, the backups did nothing at all — which is exactly what they were for.
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