“Yumi’s Cells” just got a body. The webtoon that turned one woman’s inner emotions into a cast of tiny animated characters is getting its first-ever stage musical, premiering June 30 at the CJ Towol Theater inside Seoul Arts Center, and running through August 23.
The casting alone is the story here: Girls’ Generation’s Tiffany Young and actress-singer Kim Ye-won will alternate in the lead role of Yumi, backed by a supporting cast that includes Choi Jae-rim, Jung Taek-woon, Kim So-hyang, and Yuria. For a webtoon that already became a hit live-action drama, putting a globally recognized K-pop idol in the title role is a clear signal of how far this IP’s reach now extends.
The harder problem is the one that makes this adaptation actually interesting: how do you stage “cells”? In the original webtoon and its drama adaptation, Yumi’s emotions and instincts are personified as small animated characters reacting in real time inside her head — a device that works easily in a panel or on screen, but has no obvious equivalent on a live stage. According to The Korea Times, the production answers that with songs and choreography standing in for the animation, turning Yumi’s internal cast of “cells” into actual performers sharing the stage with her.
This isn’t a rush job. Development on the stage version reportedly began back in 2021, with a showcase performance held in 2023 before this full run — five years from first concept to opening night. It’s being produced by SEM Company alongside Studio N, the adaptation-focused subsidiary of Naver Webtoon, the same company behind a growing list of webtoon-to-stage and webtoon-to-screen projects.
It’s also a useful data point on where Korean webtoons are heading as an industry. Webtoons here aren’t just comics anymore — they’re now treated as source IP meant to travel across drama, film, and increasingly theater, each adaptation aimed at a different audience that might never have opened the original app. A musical pulls in theatergoers and idol fandoms who’d never scroll a webtoon; a hit run could just as easily send some of them back to the source material afterward.
If you’re in Seoul before August 23, this is a rare chance to see a story built for a phone screen reimagined for a stage that demands the opposite of everything that made it work in the first place.
Sources: The Korea Times, “Can musical adaptation of ‘Yumi’s Cells’ bring ‘new sense of fantasy’ to beloved story?,” June 12, 2026; Anime News Network, “Yumi’s Cells Webtoon to Receive 1st Stage Musical Adaptation,” April 3, 2026.
