Cork, Ireland: Lovely Little City with Great Vegan Foodby Randi / October 22, 2018
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about Isabella Rossellini’s Link Link Circus, which played at London’s Southbank Centre this week.
Isabella Rossellini is wacky. Like super wacky. We knew this already, from her famous ‘Green Porno’ series of short films, in which she teaches us about the sexual behaviors of various animals and insects, with her in costume (and fully in character) as the mating animals and insects. It’s RIDONK. Super informative and creative, yes, but it’ll make you hella uncomfortable. That series cemented Isabella as an artistic free spirit, unafraid to look like a complete goof in furtherance of her surreally funny work. If you didn’t know this already, seeing her live will confirm oh yeah, she’s quite the innovative actress and also a straight nutter. And she’s AWESOME. Most importantly, her dog is adorable.
Rossellini started performing Link Link Circus earlier this year with a stint in NYC, and she toured various points in Europe before landing in London this week. (The gang was right to tell Ross that she’s ‘too international’.) So a few days ago husbo and I and Stanley Tucci (true story) made our way to Southbank Centre for the first of her shows and learned a bit about animal behavior. Nothing we didn’t already know, really, even though Rossellini has been studying for a masters in animal behavior. But she skims over the basics: Skinner, Aristotle, Descartes, Pavlov. Our star begins at a podium and tells us we are in a sort of theatrical conference, in which we’ll be discussing animal behavior and the various theories on whether they can think and feel (they can btw). Overall, we’re exploring the link between animals and humans, which is why she called it Link Link.
Rossellini, dressed like a ringmaster in a Picasso painting, jumps back and forth between presentation styles during the show, with the help of her assistant, Schuyler Beeman (no relation to Stan). She shares the work of the aforementioned scientists by referring to their cartoon busts on pedestals; she talks about her love for animals; she plays weird short films (including a clip from ‘Green Porno’); she plays home movies showing her various dogs throughout her life (the best part); she uses stuffed animals and children’s toys to talk about the animal kingdom. Beeman, dressed in a beekeeper outfit that’s been painted black, comes on and offstage with various props or sometimes to act as an animal himself, and he’s naturally pretty comedic so it’s always more fun when he’s around. There’s no real clear way to describe what was happening on the stage or what it’s about. The format is akin to her ‘Green Porno’ films – a series of shorts about the same general subject but different in tone and design.
The inconsistent presentation makes the whole show feel disjointed, and its central message or point confused, but it’s a pleasure to watch Isabella. She obviously loves animals (yay) and loves sharing her thoughts about them with the world. More than anything, though, the Circus is a pleasure because of her dog. Her dog is SO FORKING ADORABLE, and honestly I have no regrets about paying $34 (that’s pounddollars) to watch her and Beeman play with the doggo for 75 minutes. My only regret is that I didn’t storm the stage to pet that wittle face myself. Playing Pan, short for Peter Pan, her dog (I think the real name is Darcy?) comes on and off stage (courtesy of Beeman) dressed in adorable costumes (that poor dog) ranging from sheep to chicken to lion and it is wonderful. I was making audible squee noises but you know what, so was everyone. If anyone was doing a social experiment to see if dog lovers would pay money to literally just watch a dog live onstage and not even be able to pet him, the answer is yes. I almost stage doored for the dog but decided that would be weird. I just love dogs guys okay.
Pan the adorable doggo absolutely makes the show (she can roll over SO well), and it’s wonderful to see her get so many treats (I was so happy for her). But even without Pan’s presence, the Circus is a good time. Isabella is a special kind of old-fashioned movie star who has wriggled out of her former role (while dressed as a caterpillar probably) and is creating extraordinarily unique works in a way that no one else at her level of fame or respectability could. Though it’s likely more a question of ‘would.’
INFORMATION
Link Link Circus is playing in Belfast next week. for the rest of you, the entirety of ‘Green Porno’ is on YouTube.
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Once On This Island on Broadway: There is an Island…And It’s Pure Magic
It’s Theatre Thursday y’all!!! Today we are talking about an insanely magical new show, the revival of “Once On This Island” at Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theatre, opening on December 3.
I like a lot of the shows I see, and sometimes I love them. Every once in a while (/every few weeks) I love love a show. But rarely am I struck with a realization that I’m getting to witness pure magic. I can remember a few times when I had such a moment, sort of an out-of-body momentary recognition that I am lucky to be in this audience, like I’m stepping back from watching the show itself and thinking oh man, am I here? It has nothing to do with whether I love love the show itself; I could just like the show but have this kind of detached awareness where I recognize that parts of it are flawless or beautiful or magical. In the past decade, I can remember this happening a few times. Once was during the big title number tap break in Sutton Foster’s “Anything Goes”. That’s like a ten-minute tap dance extravaganza and halfway through I was like oh my god this is still going on and it keeps getting better I can’t believe it. (It’s easy to understand why Jonanthan Groff was so equally obsessed that he learned all of Kathleen Marshall’s choreography (and imitated every one of Sutton’s vocal inflections.)) Next was when I saw “Hamilton” and Daveed Diggs rapped his “Guns & Ships”. This was before the album was recorded (OG right here) so no one had heard this before and I was like whaaaaat this is really happening in musical theatre erma erma! There were probably one or two other moments like that in the past few years, and the most recent, and most surprising, was during the new Broadway revival of “Once on this Island”. Surprising, because I had literally zero information about this show, and because the magic feeling lasted for pretty much the entire show. Not one song or one dance, but for the entire damn thing.
The musical, which debuted on Broadway in 1990, is written by Ahrens & Flaherty (of “Anastasia” fame and “Ragtime” acclaim) and is based on a slightly older novel called “My Love, My Love” by Rosa Guy. I would have bet money that the source material was hundreds of years older, actually. It’s very folk-tale-handed-down-through-generations, and that’s how the story is presented. It tells the story of a black peasant girl on a segregated island who falls in love with a light-skinned boy from the other, more prosperous side of the island, who is one of the rich descendants of the original French conquerors. She in turn conquers her fears, the elements, and the gods that her fellow islanders pray to so fervently in order to be with him, despite their class differences and despite fate and the gods foretelling that it won’t end well. The power of love and its ability to conquer everything – well not everything, not death, but it does live on after death, we learn, in some form – is the main theme here, and not just romantic love but every incarnation and facet of love you can think of, and I forking loved every second. It’s not a perfect show – the tragic ending and kind of too-Little-Mermaidy plot is problematic if you look directly at it (like the sun) – but it’s a perfect production full of joy and life and MAGIC.
Going in, I didn’t know any of that. A few weeks ago, I went to the very first preview of the new revival on Broadway, which officially opens this Sunday. (I am not waiting to post my review until Sunday because a) I’m not a professional (that’s the hard and fast rule for professionals), b) it’s theatre Thursday y’all, and c) I’ve been made aware of the changes made in the past few weeks so I feel like the fact that I’ll share them when we talk about the relevant parts is enough. Also this is a rave. If I were blasting the thing maybe I’d wait to see a nonpreview. If you still have issues please buy me a ticket to see it again after Sunday and I’ll re-review it. you also need to buy airfare p.s.) All I knew going in was that Lea Salonga was in this production, and that Audra McDonald sang one song from it, “Come Down From The Tree”, on one of her early albums. That’s literally all I knew. I adore “Come Down From The Tree” and listened to it probably fifty billion times. Guess what, it’s not in the show; it was cut from the original production. That’s another thing I didn’t know. So I kept waiting for someone to start singing it, and that was disappointing (I’m still waitingggg), but that was the only disappointing thing about this production so we’re good. Also, the bright, gorgeous motif used in that song appears frequently throughout the show, like a gentle reassuring hug, and that made up for it.
As soon as we took our seats, there was an air of joy and excitement, the kind that doesn’t happen in most other theatre experiences. It’s mostly due to the fact that it was the first preview and a lot of loved ones were there, but it was also because this show, at Circle in the Square Theatre, is performed in the round, so you can see everyone in the small audience (it’s like 6 rows all around, so small). It’s super intimate to share the experience like that and see the faces of the people you are going on this adventure with. Also, the lights were up and the cast was already in the middle, on the ‘stage’ – which was all sand, made over like a beach, with a little lagoon flowing out on one end. I was sitting above that lagoon, where Quentin Earle Darrington, dressed like King Triton, sat next to me during the entire preshow hubbub. On ‘stage’, the rest of the cast cleaned up debris and made comments about how we have to take care of the earth. Lea Salonga was dressed in khakis as a member of a Greenpeace crew or something, and she took a cell phone call and said something like ‘no phones!’ and threw the phone away. It was pretty cute to do before the show starts, as all the annoying latecomers filter in. Finally the cast started to get into place to begin the real show, and from the first few moments I was riveted. This score, how did I not know the score before? This was a huge blind spot in my knowledge of musical theatre, and while that’s shameful, it did let me experience this show in a special way that doesn’t happen often. Everything was new and exciting. Right away, the gorgeous music struck me with its joyfulness. It is lively and exuberant and you can feel the rhythm in your heart and soul. It’s magic.
The show starts with a little girl in the Antilles who is scared of a storm. The villagers tell her a story about another little girl in a storm, one of their stories that gets passed down generations. The storytellers describe how villagers like them on an island like theirs once suffered a terrible storm, in which only a little peasant girl survived. And as they tell the story, that framing device gives way to the story they’re telling, our main story. On this island, the people zealously prayed to the four gods: Agwe, god of water (Quentin Earle Darrington, and why he looked like a hot black King Triton), Asaka, mother of the earth (blindingly good Alex Newell, who played the trans character Unique on ‘Glee’), Erzulie, goddess of love (Lea Salonga in full loving and warm mode), and Papa Ge, demon of death (Merle Dandridge in a role usually played by men but didn’t you hear, men are over and she is incredibly frightening and powerful and amazing). The storm rages – here the lights flashed and the sound of winds filled the room and I fully believed this storm. But apparently now they have actual rain and wind happening – like soaking everything and so you can feel the wind – so it’s even more powerful. Sad to have missed that but I’m glad I didn’t get wet. So this super wet and windy storm kills everyone else in the village, but the little girl is saved by the gods and found in a tree by two villagers, Mama Euralie (lovely Kenita R. Miller) and Tonton Julian (Phillip Boykin, one of my faves), who adopt her (hence why their names are mom and dad). They know that if Agwe wanted to kill her too, she would be dead, so they know that the gods saved her for a reason. The new parents name her Ti Moune, which they tell her means someone special saved by the gods for a reason, pretty on the nose. Ti Moune asks what the reason is, and her mother says the best line, “If we knew why the gods did the things they do, we would be gods ourselves.” I loved this because it recognizes how cray gods are if they are doing any of this shit. The music had already started reverberating in my heart but when the little girl started growing up and playing and she ran into the lagoon and Haley Kilgore (the actress playing the teenage Ti Moune) ran out, I was ALL IN. This was such a little bit of perfect simple direction that created this magical effect, kind of like everything in the show.
We meet our teenage Ti Moune with her big song “Waiting For Life”, and you could feel everyone in that audience wishing Haley well. This was this kid’s Broadway debut, carrying a show, and this was her moment to prove herself. And she did. I’m pretty sure everyone in the audience, including RuPaul (yes RuPaul was there erma), cried tears of happiness for her when she finished the song triumphantly. This is the kind of community that I love in the theatre. Aside from the two people across the aisle from me who wouldn’t stop talking and doing commentary like they were watching a movie in North Philly, we were all in this together and it felt like that good will and energy buoyed the actors even more.
This sense of theatrical joyousness remains throughout, but the upbeat story gets darker as we remember why the gods are watching Ti Moune – as part of a bet to see which is stronger, love or death. To find out whether Erzulie (love) or Papa Ge (death) has the stronger power, Agwe (water) raises the tide so that a young pretty-much-white boy crashes his car so that Ti Moune finds him and nurses him back to health. The fast-driving car and the crash formed another bit of simple direction, using just light and the actors, that had a magical effect, so much so that the audience applauded. There are no expensive special effects used in these amazing moments, just brilliant coordination of the actors. I love it. Daniel is from the rich side of the island, part of the people that keep the black peasants down, so Ti Moune’s family and villagers just want to let him die, as that was clearly the gods’ wish, they argue. (It wasn’t, guys.) But Ti Moune falls in love with him because he so shiny, despite his being unconscious still. Papa Ge, terrifying with a costume literally made of knives, comes to her to take Daniel’s life, and Ti Moune begs the demon to spare him and to take her own life instead. Girl he’s not even AWAKE yet. A life is a life, so Papa Ge agrees to the exchange, leaving the two younguns and promising Ti Moune that she’ll be back later, as Ti Moune’s life now belongs to her. So like, it’s not a happy show really. Shit’s dark. But it’s so much fun to watch. And Merle is so badass I can’t get over it. Like I fully believed she had godlike powers the whole time and still do now. I’m so in awe and so terrified.
While Daniel recovers, Tonton Julian goes to the other side of the island to find Daniel’s family and tell them he’s okay, I mean I imagine, and to find out more about them. Julian comes back and tells his village what he learned about Daniel’s ancestors – in like a shadow puppet performance. It’s so cool; the ensemble stands being a white sheet and tells the story using their changing shadows. More amazing work, and so precise. The French aristocrat who colonized their island during Napoleon’s time had an affair with a black peasant girl, and they had a son named Beauxhomme (again so on the nose). Once grown, Beauxhomme helped the peasants win the war with the French colonizers, so his father cursed him and the island and all Beauxhomme’s descendants, now including the young Daniel, with their hearts yearning to return to France but never being able to, so they despise the peasants for reminding them of this or something racism is stupid. Regardless, Ti Moune won’t be stopped, and she leaves her family to go find Daniel in his hotel, where he lives, like Eloise. Ti Moune’s parents reluctantly let her go and that scene is so g-d moving it’s like Boykin my GOD what CAN’T you do.
On the long, hard journey, Ti Moune’s like, oh crap, how am I gonna eat and stuff while I walk for days or weeks or however long it takes to walk across an island? And Asaka, mother of the earth, appears with his banana and feather headdress and is like ‘girl I gotcha’. And then he blows the g-d roof off the theatre as he sings “Mama Will Provide”, as he like throws bananas and stuff at Ti Moune, I don’t know, I don’t remember the details I was just like WHO IS THIS MOTHER AND WHY IS SHE OTHERWORLDLY AMAZING. So it’s Alex Newell, and he is having a BALL out there with this song and it’s THE BEST. Hot damn he is talented. I can’t wait for the cast recording (please tell me there will be a cast recording) so I can set Alex’s “Mama” to play as my alarm clock so it gives me the strength and power to GREET THE GODDAMN DAY ERRR DAY WITH JOY AND GLEE GET IT BECAUSE HE WAS ON GLEE OH MY GOD HE IS AMAZING. I mean, what a Broadway debut for one thing, but I would for sure vote for him for a Tony for this performance. How cool would that be, to be nominated for this kind of sickmazing debut.
Anyway then the fun ends and Ti Moune finds Daniel in his room at the Plaza or whatever and they have lots of weird teenage sex and that couple across the aisle from me shouted things the entire time like GIRLL UH UHHH DON’T YOU DARE, girl noooo he’s not worth it, and I was like oh my god will you please be quiet, I’m trying to watch, which sounded pedo so I just let them keep talking. Lea Salonga sings her one big song, “Human Heart”, during all this, and Lea is the perfect embodiment of love and warmth and her voice is like a big fuzzy blanket. So so beautiful, you wish it wasn’t about teenagers doing what they’re doing but anyway. Of course, things are not that easy and that joy and love can’t last because CLASS and RACE and SHIT like that stands in the way. And also Daniel has a fiancée! Of course he does; everyone in his culture has arranged marriages based on status and money and they’re set up in order for families to acquire more status and money, didn’t you know that Ti Moune?? His fiancée is the gorgeous Alysha Deslorieux, the original Schuyler sister standby from “Hamilton”, who is kind of an evil mean girl but not really because she’s just trying to get through her life too guys, like everyone, and when she’s not wearing a Belle gown she’s in the ensemble showing everyone else how to wear jean shorts and you’re like damnnn that’s how you wear jean shorts when you have human thighs and it was the most inspiring part of this very inspirational show so much so that I actually bought jean shorts that weekend. Um anyway….Her existence just sucks for Ti Moune, who is heartbroken of course over the idiot Daniel who didn’t even know he was doing anything wrong because white guys, right. Daniel is a supremely unlikable character, as you can tell I’m sure, made somehow understandable and likable by Isaac Powell’s subtle, flawless performance. I mean you hate Daniel, you do, but you also can’t hate him for being born into this situation and being too privileged to realize what it means for others. PS THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO REAL LIFE, WHITE MEN; PRIVILEGE BLINDING YOU TO REALITY DOES NOT EXCUSE YOUR BULLSHIT.
Anyway then you’re like okay Ti Moune is heartbroken and OH YEAH, she promised her life to Papa Ge, I almost forgot, tell me that that demon doesn’t follow through on that? This theme of a girl’s sacrifice to let a boy be happy, and a black girl doing it for a white boy at that, doesn’t exactly hold up in our society, but it’s not meant to. No one involved in this production is presenting this idea literally as something to reflect outside the theatre, bozos. But it does portray the power of love and how much it can accomplish. Ti Moune’s transformation by the gods and her (its (spoiler)) power to build a path between the two classes of people and maybe to end the separation between them is a pretty good legacy to have. Ariel didn’t do any of that shit, she just turned into sea foam. Yeah that’s right, Disney lied, she didn’t go live in the castle with Eric and legs, she just turned into sea foam. Ti Moune, on the other hand, stood as a symbol of love and helped bridge the divide between peoples. And she didn’t have to wear a shell bra to accomplish that.
Going in, I didn’t know any of that. A few weeks ago, I went to the very first preview of the new revival on Broadway, which officially opens this Sunday. (I am not waiting to post my review until Sunday because a) I’m not a professional (that’s the hard and fast rule for professionals), b) it’s theatre Thursday y’all, and c) I’ve been made aware of the changes made in the past few weeks so I feel like the fact that I’ll share them when we talk about the relevant parts is enough. Also this is a rave. If I were blasting the thing maybe I’d wait to see a nonpreview. If you still have issues please buy me a ticket to see it again after Sunday and I’ll re-review it. you also need to buy airfare p.s.) All I knew going in was that Lea Salonga was in this production, and that Audra McDonald sang one song from it, “Come Down From The Tree”, on one of her early albums. That’s literally all I knew. I adore “Come Down From The Tree” and listened to it probably fifty billion times. Guess what, it’s not in the show; it was cut from the original production. That’s another thing I didn’t know. So I kept waiting for someone to start singing it, and that was disappointing (I’m still waitingggg), but that was the only disappointing thing about this production so we’re good. Also, the bright, gorgeous motif used in that song appears frequently throughout the show, like a gentle reassuring hug, and that made up for it.
As soon as we took our seats, there was an air of joy and excitement, the kind that doesn’t happen in most other theatre experiences. It’s mostly due to the fact that it was the first preview and a lot of loved ones were there, but it was also because this show, at Circle in the Square Theatre, is performed in the round, so you can see everyone in the small audience (it’s like 6 rows all around, so small). It’s super intimate to share the experience like that and see the faces of the people you are going on this adventure with. Also, the lights were up and the cast was already in the middle, on the ‘stage’ – which was all sand, made over like a beach, with a little lagoon flowing out on one end. I was sitting above that lagoon, where Quentin Earle Darrington, dressed like King Triton, sat next to me during the entire preshow hubbub. On ‘stage’, the rest of the cast cleaned up debris and made comments about how we have to take care of the earth. Lea Salonga was dressed in khakis as a member of a Greenpeace crew or something, and she took a cell phone call and said something like ‘no phones!’ and threw the phone away. It was pretty cute to do before the show starts, as all the annoying latecomers filter in. Finally the cast started to get into place to begin the real show, and from the first few moments I was riveted. This score, how did I not know the score before? This was a huge blind spot in my knowledge of musical theatre, and while that’s shameful, it did let me experience this show in a special way that doesn’t happen often. Everything was new and exciting. Right away, the gorgeous music struck me with its joyfulness. It is lively and exuberant and you can feel the rhythm in your heart and soul. It’s magic.
The show starts with a little girl in the Antilles who is scared of a storm. The villagers tell her a story about another little girl in a storm, one of their stories that gets passed down generations. The storytellers describe how villagers like them on an island like theirs once suffered a terrible storm, in which only a little peasant girl survived. And as they tell the story, that framing device gives way to the story they’re telling, our main story. On this island, the people zealously prayed to the four gods: Agwe, god of water (Quentin Earle Darrington, and why he looked like a hot black King Triton), Asaka, mother of the earth (blindingly good Alex Newell, who played the trans character Unique on ‘Glee’), Erzulie, goddess of love (Lea Salonga in full loving and warm mode), and Papa Ge, demon of death (Merle Dandridge in a role usually played by men but didn’t you hear, men are over and she is incredibly frightening and powerful and amazing). The storm rages – here the lights flashed and the sound of winds filled the room and I fully believed this storm. But apparently now they have actual rain and wind happening – like soaking everything and so you can feel the wind – so it’s even more powerful. Sad to have missed that but I’m glad I didn’t get wet. So this super wet and windy storm kills everyone else in the village, but the little girl is saved by the gods and found in a tree by two villagers, Mama Euralie (lovely Kenita R. Miller) and Tonton Julian (Phillip Boykin, one of my faves), who adopt her (hence why their names are mom and dad). They know that if Agwe wanted to kill her too, she would be dead, so they know that the gods saved her for a reason. The new parents name her Ti Moune, which they tell her means someone special saved by the gods for a reason, pretty on the nose. Ti Moune asks what the reason is, and her mother says the best line, “If we knew why the gods did the things they do, we would be gods ourselves.” I loved this because it recognizes how cray gods are if they are doing any of this shit. The music had already started reverberating in my heart but when the little girl started growing up and playing and she ran into the lagoon and Haley Kilgore (the actress playing the teenage Ti Moune) ran out, I was ALL IN. This was such a little bit of perfect simple direction that created this magical effect, kind of like everything in the show.
We meet our teenage Ti Moune with her big song “Waiting For Life”, and you could feel everyone in that audience wishing Haley well. This was this kid’s Broadway debut, carrying a show, and this was her moment to prove herself. And she did. I’m pretty sure everyone in the audience, including RuPaul (yes RuPaul was there erma), cried tears of happiness for her when she finished the song triumphantly. This is the kind of community that I love in the theatre. Aside from the two people across the aisle from me who wouldn’t stop talking and doing commentary like they were watching a movie in North Philly, we were all in this together and it felt like that good will and energy buoyed the actors even more.
This sense of theatrical joyousness remains throughout, but the upbeat story gets darker as we remember why the gods are watching Ti Moune – as part of a bet to see which is stronger, love or death. To find out whether Erzulie (love) or Papa Ge (death) has the stronger power, Agwe (water) raises the tide so that a young pretty-much-white boy crashes his car so that Ti Moune finds him and nurses him back to health. The fast-driving car and the crash formed another bit of simple direction, using just light and the actors, that had a magical effect, so much so that the audience applauded. There are no expensive special effects used in these amazing moments, just brilliant coordination of the actors. I love it. Daniel is from the rich side of the island, part of the people that keep the black peasants down, so Ti Moune’s family and villagers just want to let him die, as that was clearly the gods’ wish, they argue. (It wasn’t, guys.) But Ti Moune falls in love with him because he so shiny, despite his being unconscious still. Papa Ge, terrifying with a costume literally made of knives, comes to her to take Daniel’s life, and Ti Moune begs the demon to spare him and to take her own life instead. Girl he’s not even AWAKE yet. A life is a life, so Papa Ge agrees to the exchange, leaving the two younguns and promising Ti Moune that she’ll be back later, as Ti Moune’s life now belongs to her. So like, it’s not a happy show really. Shit’s dark. But it’s so much fun to watch. And Merle is so badass I can’t get over it. Like I fully believed she had godlike powers the whole time and still do now. I’m so in awe and so terrified.
While Daniel recovers, Tonton Julian goes to the other side of the island to find Daniel’s family and tell them he’s okay, I mean I imagine, and to find out more about them. Julian comes back and tells his village what he learned about Daniel’s ancestors – in like a shadow puppet performance. It’s so cool; the ensemble stands being a white sheet and tells the story using their changing shadows. More amazing work, and so precise. The French aristocrat who colonized their island during Napoleon’s time had an affair with a black peasant girl, and they had a son named Beauxhomme (again so on the nose). Once grown, Beauxhomme helped the peasants win the war with the French colonizers, so his father cursed him and the island and all Beauxhomme’s descendants, now including the young Daniel, with their hearts yearning to return to France but never being able to, so they despise the peasants for reminding them of this or something racism is stupid. Regardless, Ti Moune won’t be stopped, and she leaves her family to go find Daniel in his hotel, where he lives, like Eloise. Ti Moune’s parents reluctantly let her go and that scene is so g-d moving it’s like Boykin my GOD what CAN’T you do.
On the long, hard journey, Ti Moune’s like, oh crap, how am I gonna eat and stuff while I walk for days or weeks or however long it takes to walk across an island? And Asaka, mother of the earth, appears with his banana and feather headdress and is like ‘girl I gotcha’. And then he blows the g-d roof off the theatre as he sings “Mama Will Provide”, as he like throws bananas and stuff at Ti Moune, I don’t know, I don’t remember the details I was just like WHO IS THIS MOTHER AND WHY IS SHE OTHERWORLDLY AMAZING. So it’s Alex Newell, and he is having a BALL out there with this song and it’s THE BEST. Hot damn he is talented. I can’t wait for the cast recording (please tell me there will be a cast recording) so I can set Alex’s “Mama” to play as my alarm clock so it gives me the strength and power to GREET THE GODDAMN DAY ERRR DAY WITH JOY AND GLEE GET IT BECAUSE HE WAS ON GLEE OH MY GOD HE IS AMAZING. I mean, what a Broadway debut for one thing, but I would for sure vote for him for a Tony for this performance. How cool would that be, to be nominated for this kind of sickmazing debut.
Anyway then the fun ends and Ti Moune finds Daniel in his room at the Plaza or whatever and they have lots of weird teenage sex and that couple across the aisle from me shouted things the entire time like GIRLL UH UHHH DON’T YOU DARE, girl noooo he’s not worth it, and I was like oh my god will you please be quiet, I’m trying to watch, which sounded pedo so I just let them keep talking. Lea Salonga sings her one big song, “Human Heart”, during all this, and Lea is the perfect embodiment of love and warmth and her voice is like a big fuzzy blanket. So so beautiful, you wish it wasn’t about teenagers doing what they’re doing but anyway. Of course, things are not that easy and that joy and love can’t last because CLASS and RACE and SHIT like that stands in the way. And also Daniel has a fiancée! Of course he does; everyone in his culture has arranged marriages based on status and money and they’re set up in order for families to acquire more status and money, didn’t you know that Ti Moune?? His fiancée is the gorgeous Alysha Deslorieux, the original Schuyler sister standby from “Hamilton”, who is kind of an evil mean girl but not really because she’s just trying to get through her life too guys, like everyone, and when she’s not wearing a Belle gown she’s in the ensemble showing everyone else how to wear jean shorts and you’re like damnnn that’s how you wear jean shorts when you have human thighs and it was the most inspiring part of this very inspirational show so much so that I actually bought jean shorts that weekend. Um anyway….Her existence just sucks for Ti Moune, who is heartbroken of course over the idiot Daniel who didn’t even know he was doing anything wrong because white guys, right. Daniel is a supremely unlikable character, as you can tell I’m sure, made somehow understandable and likable by Isaac Powell’s subtle, flawless performance. I mean you hate Daniel, you do, but you also can’t hate him for being born into this situation and being too privileged to realize what it means for others. PS THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO REAL LIFE, WHITE MEN; PRIVILEGE BLINDING YOU TO REALITY DOES NOT EXCUSE YOUR BULLSHIT.
Anyway then you’re like okay Ti Moune is heartbroken and OH YEAH, she promised her life to Papa Ge, I almost forgot, tell me that that demon doesn’t follow through on that? This theme of a girl’s sacrifice to let a boy be happy, and a black girl doing it for a white boy at that, doesn’t exactly hold up in our society, but it’s not meant to. No one involved in this production is presenting this idea literally as something to reflect outside the theatre, bozos. But it does portray the power of love and how much it can accomplish. Ti Moune’s transformation by the gods and her (its (spoiler)) power to build a path between the two classes of people and maybe to end the separation between them is a pretty good legacy to have. Ariel didn’t do any of that shit, she just turned into sea foam. Yeah that’s right, Disney lied, she didn’t go live in the castle with Eric and legs, she just turned into sea foam. Ti Moune, on the other hand, stood as a symbol of love and helped bridge the divide between peoples. And she didn’t have to wear a shell bra to accomplish that.
As her story ends, the framing device of the storytellers telling the story (that’s what they do that’s what they do) to the little girl returns, except now it’s in a village’s school and a BILLION little kids in navy school uniforms ran down all the aisles down to the stage as part of the classroom that just learned the story of Ti Moune. This was the one part of the entire show that threw me for a loop, in a not great way. I was too busy thinking ‘ahhh an army of children save yourselves save yourselves’ to really relish how this show came together. The kids were distracting and unnecessary, and having the one original little girl from the beginning learning how the folk tale ends would have accomplished the same goal, of showing how the stories are passed down so that new generations learn the tales and the lessons. Apparently, the creative team thought the same thing, because it turns out that all those kids have been axed now. Sorry poor little unemployed 7 year olds, go get a new job. No so it’s a smart move, but even with them and the confusion they caused I still was a mess at that ending because the storytellers showed the little girl little Ti Moune and Daniel dolls and I was just a basketcase when I noticed that because that’s just like how we all were with toys from our culture’s stories and then I cried even harder as the whole company sang about why they tell the story LOVE IS WHYYYY WE TELL THE STORY and so on ohmygod I need the recording now stat also I need to see this again and so do you the end goodbye.
INFORMATION
The show is one act, about 90 minutes (of pure freaking theatre magic) so pee beforehand. The Circle in the Square has the WORST little tiny lobby so just expect to be rammed in like sardines when you go to the box office at street level. And then get down the escalators to the basement/main area as fast as you can.
The producers have implemented a ‘best price guarantee’ for this show, which is groundbreaking. It means that they’re guaranteeing that you can get the cheapest tickets from the box office directly. So cool.
STAGEDOOR
The joy of the first performance remained at 110% after the show, as most of the audience waited outside the main doors for the entire cast, every single one, to come out to raucous cheers. It was so beautiful. They seemed to be having a blast too, making fun of each other for taking too long to sign and stuff like that. Everyone signed and most seemed happy to take selfies (not Lea, but she never seems happy to stage door, which is kind of understandable when every single time I’ve seen her there have been like a dozen people at stage door screaming at her for being their idol and how they came from the Philippines to see her and how they are owed a picture for that and she’s like ‘please don’t kill me’ so I get why she seems reluctant). It was so much fun, EXCEPT, except, the show has the MOST ANNOYING social media team. They were taking pictures and videos of us, the crowd waiting at stagedoor, and of course I was right up front so I tried my best to hide my face with a playbill but still that shit is just so annoying and rude come on guys if I wanted people to be taking my picture I’d be the one coming out of that door, know what I’m saying?
“Allegiance” with George Takei on Broadway: Personal, Powerful, and Worthy
Several nights ago, a horrible excuse for a sack of meat, let alone a human, won a presidential primary thanks to extreme racist beliefs. He supports banning all people with a certain religious and ethnic background from entering the USA, and thinks we should register and track those already in the country. He, and every other leading Republican, thinks it’s okay to have a ‘total and complete ban’ on millions of people. And, he said he might have supported Japanese internment camps during World War II, obviously, because it fits well with everything else he supports.
The most disturbing part is how many people agree with him, with prejudice too strong to be countered with reason and humanity. Or maybe they forget or never even were told about the horror of Japanese internment. They probably don’t know that someone we all love grew up in one of the camps: George Takei. Aghast that the lessons our country was supposed to have learned from this have been forgotten, Takei gathered a few of his talented friends and helped inspire the new musical “Allegiance”, which ends its Broadway run on Sunday.
It’s a shame that it’s closing, but that speaks more to how business goes in the winter for shows that aren’t behemoths more than the show’s quality. Plus, it’s upsetting as hell to spend time with the issues concerned. Many tourists don’t want to spend their one Broadway show slot crying their eyes out, and others would rather turn a blind eye to our past horrors. I saw “Allegiance” just for Takei and costar Lea Salonga, the superb and the beloved, but had low expectations after reading a few online reviews bemoaning the lackluster score.
While it’s true that the score might not add new standards to the cabaret circuit, it didn’t matter. It was basic but solid, with pleasant melodies and good lyrics. As a whole, everything worked and I didn’t roll my eyes violently even once, which is a rare thing with new musicals nowadays. (“Bend It Like Beckham” almost rendered me blind. I can’t even talk about it.) More importantly, this show was one of the most moving and heartbreaking I’ve ever seen. Although a completely different vibe from “Spring Awakening”, it reminded me of it, with its similar theme of how ignorance and refusing to treat others with humanity can destroy generations.
“Allegiance” is inspired by Takei’s own experience in the camps, which repeatedly acts like a gut punch, when you realize not only did this happen to hundreds of thousands of people, but to someone you feel like you know, someone who is standing right in front of you. I wonder how republicans would feel if they saw this. I mean it shouldn’t take knowing certain people personally or being able to point to them to make you see them as human, but as we learned from all the republicans who only came around to accepting gays as people when it was their own relative &c., a lot of people have trouble empathizing unless they’re forced to in that way. A lot of people are terrible!
The show begins with Takei as elderly Sam Kimura, WWII veteran, putting on his uniform to commemorate Pearl Harbor Day. He’s interrupted by a woman informing him that his older sister, Kei, has died. This woman, the executor of Kei’s will, has a package for Sam, who starts cursing the heavens and his long-estranged sister, angry that she couldn’t just leave him in peace. Uh, damn son! What happened to make you so mad at your sister and so wounded? Let’s find out!
After this present-day prologue, the core of the show starts, with young Sam (played by Telly Leung) and Kei (Lea Salonga) as young adults just before the war really hits America. They are Japanese Americans, born in the USA after their father Tatsuo (Christopheren Nomura) and now-deceased mother immigrated. The family, along with grandfather Ojii-san (played by Takei) who was born in Japan and speaks little English, lives in California where they own and run a successful farm. Tatsuo is hard on his son, and Sammy thinks his father’s disappointment and unreachable standards stem from his mother having died during childbirth. Sammy thinks his father blames him.
The family, well liked and respected in their town, soon has its world turned upside down when the USA is attacked at Pearl Harbor and the insane government decides to send everyone in the country with Japanese ancestry to the camps. Despite being born there and/or being legal citizens, the whole family is sent to Heart Mountain camp, with their farm, house, and all property seized, with no reimbursement. It’s awful, to say the least. Military personnel with power issues are running things at the camp. There’s no clean water, no medicine, no privacy, and no freedom. Sure the writers took some dramatic liberties elaborating on reality, but still, even without the embellishments it’s still a mfing hellish internment camp.
Sammy is a young idealist who refuses to complain about or fight against his circumstances, who wants desperately to be a standup, respectable American, and a model Japanese-American man. But this drive to please his country’s government means he betrays his family’s and his people’s dignity. Instead of exercising civil disobedience or active insubordination with other inmates like his sister’s new boyfriend Frank, Sammy not only obeys but tries to get everyone else to conform as well, thinking that it’s for their own good in the long run. He makes friends with the head of the Japanese American Citizens League, Masaoka (Greg Watanabe), the ineffectual official who doesn’t fight hard enough, or at all, to stop the internment. Sammy helps him by identifying disloyal citizens, like Frank, who refuses to cooperate and refuses to join the army, burning his draft card. To be fair, it seems like a pretty dick move to draft people who you threw in internment camps, so we can’t fault Frank at all. But Sammy does, big time.
Despite being so troublesome in this regard, Sammy is pretty likeable due to Telly Leung’s portrayal. Telly, who can rival Jonathan Groff with how much he spits while singing, shows you that Sammy is not a traitor to any group but is trying to figure out the right path to take in a time when nothing was done right. He’s young, he’s naïve, and he’s trying to do the best he can by people who will never agree. While in the camp, he falls in love with the white nurse on campus, Hannah, played by Katie Rose Clarke. I heavily disliked her in ‘The Light in the Piazza’ when she took over for Kelli O’Hara, but that role is nigh impossible to nail down properly. Here, Katie is extremely likeable and well used.
Spoilies for my memory: Before all that goes down, Sammy joins the army and becomes a poster child for the government’s propaganda campaign on how successful the camps are and how some Japanese can be exemplary Americans. He promised nurse Hannah that he would come back to marry her – who would have thought he’d survive and she wouldn’t. His father, meanwhile, refuses to answer a bogus loyalty questionnaire in the manner the government wants, and is sent to prison. Kei gets preggers by Frank and they get married. Ojii-san, Takei’s wonderfully stereotypically grandfather character, full of wisdom and optimism, dies in the garden that he somehow managed to grow in their desolate mountain camp. It’s all pretty depressing stuff, one right after the other, all while Sammy is deep in the trenches with no idea.
Oh the audience is legit sobbing during all of this. I started crying as soon as I saw Lea Salonga like 5 feet in front of me (front row rush seats what what) and did not stop. Lea’s Kei gets the greatest song in the show, “Higher”, which is reprised several times. She sings about how as a little girl, she lived carefree, playing on her swingset with her mother. Then after her mother’s death, Kei had to be mother to Sammy and forget about being a child herself, but she loved her brother so much that she didn’t care. She helped him to always swing and fly and dream ‘higher’ to the detriment of her own growth, and she now decides to maybe start living her life more like she did before. It’s her “Ima get mine” song, pretty much, but beautiful and touching.
Meanwhile, Sammy is becoming a huge media star, this poster child for the war and all the decisions the government made, and he ends up on the cover of Life magazine. Tatsuo, in that horrible prison where he’s treated abominably, is released by the government just because of his son’s work. Although we were led to think Tatsuo was always disappointed in his son, he was just a tough old man but loved his son. He’s so proud of his soldier son even though they disagree, and he was overjoyed to see him on the magazine cover.
But when Sammy returns, everything has changed. The camps have been emptied, and he finds that his sister has her own family. When Sammy sees, after being through war, that his sister married the man he hates for refusing to defend America and that his father has accepted Frank into the family, he storms off – for good. That was the last time he saw any of them. The rift we heard about in the prologue has been that long, like 60 years. Insanity.
We cut back to present day, and old-man Sam (Takei) opens the package the executor left him. It’s that copy of Life magazine with him on the cover that his father and then his sister saved and cherished for all those years because they always loved him and were proud of him. So this is when everyone in the audience – EVERYONE – started sobbing if they hadn’t already been. Most people were like me and were just crying the whole time. But at this point the stragglers joined in.
Sam goes to Kei’s funeral to pay his respects and get some sort of closure. Afterwards, the executor walks over to him to see how he is. They share a few words before she mentions her mother – Kei. This is Hannah, Kei’s daughter whom Sammy met just once when she was a baby. They named her after Sammy’s nurse girlfriend, after she died saving Frank’s life. I mean. It may seem overwrought but it all worked so magnificently. Oh this is when the whole audience continued crying but much more violently and breathlessly, more like wailing. It was rough. And amazing. I’ve never been a part of an audience that was so emotionally invested and it was really special.
Also really special? Being that close to George Takei and Lea Salonga, George we know and love because of his real life persona post-Star Trek. Lea is a theatre goddess, after originating the role of Kim in “Miss Saigon” when she was just 18, in 1989. She also played Eponine in Les Miserables on Broadway so she just dies in every single f-ing show she’s in. Can we maybe get a show for Lea where she lives at the end? Anyway, her voice was spellbinding then and she is similarly captivating and wonderful here. She rightly gets the best songs, including the heartbreaking “Higher” and the show’s anthem “Gaman”, which is a Buddhist word meaning patience, perseverance, and ‘enduring the seemingly unbearable with dignity’. Like I said, the score isn’t life-changing but it is satisfying and moving, and these two songs alone make a case for it.
“Allegiance” won’t win any awards and will close far from recouping, but it’s a lovely show that is so heartfelt and powerful. I hope it has a long life with regional productions and maybe most importantly school shows. It’s the kind of show that needs to be performed and seen everywhere. I spoke with Takei after the show about how awful it is that the show’s lessons are so relevant today, when we should know better. He was the best person ever at stage door, by the way, and talked for a while about how he hopes the country will make good decisions and stop putting blatant racists in power. My words; George was much more eloquent and kind than I could ever hope to be. I hope for all of our sakes that the message this show shares so beautifully is shared, and embraced.
