{"id":98344,"date":"2026-07-25T09:45:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T09:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/98344\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T09:45:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T09:45:11","slug":"tiffany-young-has-done-everything-in-k-pop-building-a-musical-from-scratch-still-scares-her","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/98344\/","title":{"rendered":"Tiffany Young has done everything in K-pop. Building a musical from scratch still scares her"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Girls’ Generation singer on originating the title role in ‘Yumi’s Cells’ and husband’s support that keeps her going<\/p>\n

\"Tiffany Tiffany Young (Pacific Music Group) <\/p>\n

Over nearly two decades, Tiffany Young has performed as a member of Girls’ Generation, its sub-unit TaeTiSeo, and as a soloist. She has mastered the three-minute pop stage and made her own music. In 2011, she made her foray into musical theater with “Fame,” then established herself as a stage actor, appearing in “Chicago” for two seasons in 2021 and 2024.<\/p>\n

But stepping into an original production made her nervous, she said during an interview on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

That production is “Yumi’s Cells,” a new musical based on the hit webtoon and TV series. Young plays the title role of Yumi during a landmark stretch: She recently married actor Byun Yo-han, signed with Pacific Music Group, and celebrates Girls’ Generation’s 20th anniversary next year.<\/p>\n

Her role was being written and rewritten up to the last minute as the team searched for the right emotional pitch.<\/p>\n

“Dozens of versions are still in my head and in my files,” she said. “I’d ask, ‘Should I pull up the May 11 version? Should I give you the June 28 one for these few bars?'”<\/p>\n

If anything, the constant revision became the point. The team’s confidence carried her through it. “They told me, ‘We brought in a veteran; Tiffany can pull this off,'” she recalled, and she came to see the whole process as an exercise in building flexibility.<\/p>\n

Building Yumi, oddly, meant getting out of the way. Normally outspoken, Young held back in rehearsal.<\/p>\n

“I just wanted to be an instrument,” she said. She was so quiet that director Yang Jeong-woong told her to speak up if she had something to say. Everyone kept telling her she was Yumi already, so she let the team shape the character around her. “Yumi was already such a complete character,” she said, “that even someone as opinionated as me had nothing to add.”<\/p>\n

Young is, by her own account, a compulsive researcher who will “dig to the ends of the earth.” For Yumi, she pored over the webtoon, its merchandise, even old reader comments. Yet during the run, she is deliberately not reading reviews. As a pop performer, she said, a stage lasts three minutes, and the job is to read the crowd’s response inside that window. A musical is different: her task is to deliver the story the team designed, the same way every night, and for that she leans on the directors. The reactions can wait. “For now, I’m not watching them,” she said.<\/p>\n

\"Tiffany Tiffany Young performs Yumi in “Yumi’s Cells” (SEM Company) <\/p>\n

Publicly, Young reads as the polished one \u2014 sharp, composed, the member who has it together. Yumi is the opposite: awkward, forever tripping over herself. Young found that freeing. “I got to pour out all the clumsiness in me,” she said. “So what if I fall short? This is who I am.” The role, she added, let her show a human side and give the audience something to recognize in themselves.<\/p>\n

The musical, which runs through Aug. 23, arrives amid a crowded year as she tours and prepares new music alongside the show. For Young, the crowded schedule isn’t a burden, but a pace she knows well.<\/p>\n

“I’ve always lived this busy,” she said, crediting Girls’ Generation for making the pace second nature and her husband for the steadiness beneath it. “Because I have a life partner now, I get more support and a sense of rhythm, so I can focus and push even harder.” It is less about flooring the gas, she added, than about showing up steadily, and with good work. <\/p>\n

A single thread, Young says, runs through her expansive career: she chases good stories. “Into the New World,” Girls’ Generation’s debut, carried one, she said; so did “Twinkle,” the TaeTiSeo single. Following that instinct is what led her to the “Yumi’s Cells” script. “When you find a good story,” she said, “good people gather around it.”<\/p>\n

That, in the end, is what she wants audiences to carry out of the theater. “The reason I stand on stage is to give someone comfort,” she said. “I hope people watch this and leave with some of it.”<\/p>\n

\"Tiffany Tiffany Young (Pacific Music Group)
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