An Incredible Oooooklahoma! Like You’ve Never Seen Before

​      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.

It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about “The Humans”, which is at London’s Hampstead Theatre until October 13.
As summer plays close and the new season slowly gets into gear, London’s drama scene got a much needed infusion of American greatness with the Broadway transfer of “The Humans”. Stephen Karam’s 2015 work about an ordinary American family and the hardships they face individually and together comes to London’s Hampstead Theatre with its Broadway cast intact, along with my favorite Broadway director-that-I-once-saw-give-one-of-the-best-acting-performances-ever-in-The-Normal-Heart-but-that’s-neither-here-nor-there, Joe Mantello, still at the helm. Winner of the 2016 Tony Award for Best Play, “The Humans” seems like the basic story of a typical family at first, but its brilliance lies in nuance and individual interpretation that will have you contemplating it endlessly.​

​If you are in London and might be seeing it before it closes next month, bookmark this page and read it post-show because there’s gonna be hella spoilers coming. 

The play tells the story of the Blake family, from Scranton, Pa., coming together to celebrate Thanksgiving amid a snowstorm at their daughter Brigid’s new Chinatown NYC hovel. You have the father Erik (Reed Birney, who we had just seen days before in his episodes of ‘The Americans’, which we’ve now finished and can’t stop talking about so hit me up if you want in on our support group), the mother Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell, always a goddamn pleasure), the grandmother Momo (Lauren Klein, who does so much with so little), the adult daughters Aimee (Cassie Beck, so perfectly capturing every nice but kind of depressed girl I know) and Brigid (Sarah Steele, so perfectly capturing every self-involved and jappy as hell non-jew I’ve ever known), and Brigid’s boyfriend Richard (Arian Moayad, trying to keep the peace between a family he’s just meeting and sooo nailing that awkward ass-kissing that you have to do while trying to keep conversation smooth). 

Brigid and Richard have just moved into this dumpy basement apartment which yes has two levels which is great in a city like New York, but it also has no windows except the one with bars over it that opens onto the smoky alleyway so already it is my nightmare apartment. To make me even more anxious about their living situation, their upstairs neighbor is straight out of those “funny” Upstairs Neighbors videos that imagine them as actively trying to make as much noise as possible, doing things like rolling bowling balls around and moving furniture in the middle of the night. IT’S TRUE WHY ARE THEY ALL SO FORKING LOUD. And they all stomp. Anyway, every once in a while Brigid and Richard’s new neighbor will create some crazy loud BANG. They’re okay with it, trying to make the best of the situation, but Erik is shaken to his core with every sporadic bang or crash from upstairs. 

As we meet the family, we quickly learn all their shortcomings and issues through effective and efficient dialogue. Brigid, self-involved as she is, has forgotten to tell her parents about the two-story situation, which, given that Momo is in a wheelchair (and suffering from late-stage dementia), is quite the oversight. God she was S0 many people I know. Aimee, meanwhile, is falling apart at the seams, having just gotten dumped by her long-term partner and dealing with really horrible ulcerative colitis. Her ‘win-sided phin call’, as Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland would call it, to her ex-girlfriend is heart-breaking, as is the reaction of her father, secretly within earshot, who couldn’t do anything to help his daughter. Letting intimate moments like this breathe is what makes this play’s version of this family so special.

Although Jayne Houdyshell is the epitome of warmth, the girls tend to be harder on their mother than they are on their father, who they dote on. They love everything about Erik, but they constantly make fun of Deirdre, from her ridiculous emails to her charity work to her dedication to religion. It seems a little harmless and a little unfair at the same time, although it provides for a lot of great comedy that rings so true to everyone’s family. Like how Deirdre sends Aimee every single tragic LGBT news story simply because she is a lesbian, and so Brigid tells her mom, “You don’t have to text her every time a lesbian kills herself!” They also make fun of her forwarded emails, the kind with 12 different kinds of font used, which we all know so well. Deirdre gives it back though, like telling off the depressed Aimee, when she brings up her interest in superfoods, “If you’re so miserable why are you trying to live forever?” Loves it. The way they paint these characters with such an accurate, familiar brush is genius, letting us immediately identify with so many aspects so that we are invested in their problems. 

And the problems become apparent. There are the obvious sort like Brigid’s subpar home, Aimee’s mental and physical health, Momo’s dementia. Then there’s the fact that both daughters are failing professionally, through no real fault of their own, in a harsh specific economy and a hard general world. Like every struggling middle class family, the parents are having trouble at work too, with Deirdre getting passed over for promotions simply due to her age (and probably gender), while Erik’s failings are the only ones attached to actual responsibility. When the demons haunting him come out to the family, it’s shocking, since we’ve seen him as the stalwart, upstanding member of this clan that the girls idolize. That he alone is responsible for hurting his family and their future the way he has changes the easygoing dynamic and leaves everyone unsure of how to proceed in their usual way. 

And, as the night progresses, Erik’s reaction to the noise gets more extreme, as does his seeming skittishness about everything, from lights going out to pans falling off tables. This is where the play is not just a family drama but is also kind of a thriller. Erik’s terror at things  going bump in the night, and the unexplained reasons for them, make it seem like at any moment an alien predator will pop out and attack, and often had me holding my breath. And it’s why a lot of people think that he dies at the end, when he goes through the hallway that resembles a tunnel of the only visible light. But while I’m not going to tell anyone their interpretation of plays is wrong, I didn’t think he died. I think that his terror and his reactions to the supernatural-seeming elements were there to show that none of that is as scary as facing your own problems, the messes you’ve created in reality. The scary neighbor who freaked him out was just doing laundry, proving that the things that can terrify you in the dark are nothing compared to dealing with your reality when things you’ve done wrong come to light. What he did and what he has to contend with now are much scarier that whatever could have caused those bangs or crashes in the apartment, and that’s the realization that elevates this work from a typical but great family drama to a provocative, intriguing masterpiece.

INFORMATION
“The Humans” is playing at London’s Hampstead Theatre until October 13. It is a 90 minute one act. 

STAGE DOOR
The Hampstead’s stage door situation is more like a ‘everyone convene in the lobby!’ situation. The cast is very friendly although I was too embarrassed to talk to everyone or ask for pictures because I’m a weirdo.