January 19, 2023
Watch on the Rhine at the Donmar is the Best Play in London RN NLby Randi / January 24, 2023It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is Allegiance, playing at the Charing Cross Theatre until April 8. OHHH MYYY!
George Takei’s very personal show about the Japanese internment camps that the United States thought were cool cool cool during WWII has come to London. I say ‘his show’ even though he didn’t write it because everyone calls it that, because it’s inspired by his life story. Our beloved Georgie was taken to the camps in California when he was mfing 5 YEARS OLD. It’s hard enough to watch adults playacting at living through this horror onstage; can you even fathom what it was like for this beloved man as a tiny boy? You cannot. So everything he brings to it — the harrowing story, the heart, the lovable performance, the magic of seeing this public persona live onstage — is wonderful, and the show is moving in large part because of all his gifts, gifts of performance and connection and the biggest one, of giving his story to the theatre.
The show begins with an elderly Japanese man named Sam (IT’S GEORGE!) dressing in his WWII uniform to mark the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, as he does every year. A woman comes to his door with the news that his sister Kei has died, and George kinda freaks out like STOP IT, PAST, LEAVE ME ALONE, I HADN’T TALKED TO KEI IN 50 YEARS! which is, wow, REALLY sad, like that’s a really long time, that’s much longer than I’ve been alive, wtf, how could you not talk to your sister for that long, what the crap happened? Luckily the show goes awooawoowoo and turns back time to show us the story of what happened. Sam becomes mfing lovable Telly Leung all the way from the great white wayyy yes Tellayyyyy! to play Sam as the young man, forced at the prime of his life to enter the internment camps with his sister Kei, his father who he THINKS is always disappointed in him but is he really or is he just strict and not great with English?, and his grandfather (played by George now). We see the trials and tribulations, yet also the hope and light they forge in the camps with their fellow prisoners, and the love they find – including TellySam with a hawhite nurse, Hannah. STUFF GOES DOWN!
Real talk, it’s not a great show because it still needs some editing of the story to make it as strong as it should be, but you are either lying or dead inside if you aren’t moved at least a few times. Removed from my first viewing on Broadway 7 years ago (jeeez), I can see how great this show could be with the help of a dramaturg. I’m a big believer that every show should hire a dramaturg for at the very least a once-over, like a final edit to make sure it’s in tip-toppiest. But even so, Allegiance has so many good qualities and strong parts, some great songs, some real potential in its characters and storylines. The parts don’t add up to as good or as strong a whole as they should, as it deserves. All that goodness is still there, but it needs some refining, and it’s a shame it didn’t get it.
BUT it’s all still there to be enjoyed and to be moved by! Allegiance is enjoyable and manages to tug at the heartstrings (I know I pick on the big miss at the Guardian because she’s terrible but like, objectively, how could you NOT. FEEL. ANYTHING. at the end? with the magazine? come on). Aynrand (real name…we are still both shocked and in awe of this…I just…her parents…wouldn’t you change…what’s…how’s…what’s…oh it’s just so amazing…and also no) Ferrer as Kei sounds very much like Lea Salonga, there’s a very similar tone to her voice, which is quite possibly the highest compliment that can be given on this planet, so her songs were a treat to listen to, including importantly my favorite song in the show, ‘Higher’. Its simple clear lyrics paint such an effective portrait of her childhood and her sacrifices, and so efficiently, it makes me teary every time. LOVES IT. Kei and Frankie, her love, didn’t have like, great chemistry (sorry Frankie) but I totally dug what Telly and Nurse Hannah created with their few songs (including the bop ‘I Oughta Go’, which was staged well).
Most of all, it’s a gift to see George Takei acting live onstage, giving his everything so we can feel and understand the importance of what he’s trying to convey. SO LISTEN TO HIM. HE’S BEEN THROUGH SO MUCH. HE’S 85 YEARS OLD. LISTEN TO HIMMMM. GO SEE IT AND BOW DOWN TO HIM. CRY YOU BASTARDS! WE LOVE YOU GEORGE!
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Thoughts on: Far From Heaven, Off-Broadway
The sold-out run of Far From Heaven at Playwrights Horizons promised a more epic experience that the one I actually had. It starred the magnificent Kelli O’Hara, was written by the musical team from Grey Gardens, was based on the 2002 Oscar-nominated movie starring Julianne Moore. I paid more than I ever have for a Broadway ticket, and I expected to be astonished. Aside from getting to listen to O’Hara’s beautiful voice live, I was actually disappointed.
The show put forth a solid effort, but it felt like a house constructed without a foundation. Considering how miraculously affecting much of the Grey Gardens music was, I expected at least one song to make me feel something. Instead, I felt less than I do while watching episodes from season 2 of New Girl. And that shouldn’t be close to the case for a show about a woman, mother, wife in the 1950s dealing with her homosexual, philandering husband and her own surprising romantic feelings for her black gardener. I know! It’s all there, waiting to be interpreted and transcended, and yet the opportunity was squandered. This show deals with pretty much the most serious dramatic ploys possible – all of them! – yet doesn’t deliver emotionally. There has to be a really big disconnect among the creators for something like that to happen.
The show put forth a solid effort, but it felt like a house constructed without a foundation. Considering how miraculously affecting much of the Grey Gardens music was, I expected at least one song to make me feel something. Instead, I felt less than I do while watching episodes from season 2 of New Girl. And that shouldn’t be close to the case for a show about a woman, mother, wife in the 1950s dealing with her homosexual, philandering husband and her own surprising romantic feelings for her black gardener. I know! It’s all there, waiting to be interpreted and transcended, and yet the opportunity was squandered. This show deals with pretty much the most serious dramatic ploys possible – all of them! – yet doesn’t deliver emotionally. There has to be a really big disconnect among the creators for something like that to happen.
I would love for this show to move to Broadway, but only if it undergoes serious reworking. Several new songs that better fit O’Hara’s talents are necessary. Although she always manages to be good, even in things like Nice Work If You Can Get It, her voice is not one that you let sit there on run-of-the-mill, generic, straightforward songs. Let her shine! Christine Ebersole’s performance of “Another Winter In A Summer Town”, from Grey Gardens, gives me chills just thinking about. O’Hara, just as capable of producing such a performance, was given no such opportunity.
The songs need to be rewritten, plain and simple. The book needs editing too, as I saw way too much of Cathy’s (O’Hara) husband’s office, and not enough of Cathy’s best friend’s seeming understanding yet complete and utter disapproval. I also didn’t understand the casting of Steve Pasquale as the husband. Maybe it was because I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Diction, people!
I didn’t actively dislike the show, but I didn’t actively feel anything, which is a huge problem. Plays happen up on that stage in order to make you, the audience, feel something, and I felt nothing. I just wanted to badly for it to be the event I was hoping for. With any luck, severe changes will be made and the show will be entirely transformed when (if) it goes to Broadway. I sincerely hope this happens, because everyone involved deserves better.
The songs need to be rewritten, plain and simple. The book needs editing too, as I saw way too much of Cathy’s (O’Hara) husband’s office, and not enough of Cathy’s best friend’s seeming understanding yet complete and utter disapproval. I also didn’t understand the casting of Steve Pasquale as the husband. Maybe it was because I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Diction, people!
I didn’t actively dislike the show, but I didn’t actively feel anything, which is a huge problem. Plays happen up on that stage in order to make you, the audience, feel something, and I felt nothing. I just wanted to badly for it to be the event I was hoping for. With any luck, severe changes will be made and the show will be entirely transformed when (if) it goes to Broadway. I sincerely hope this happens, because everyone involved deserves better.
The Rage of Narcissus: Provocative & Disturbing New Work at the Pleasance
With all the theatre we see (it’s a lot), there are only a few times when all we can say to each other at the end of a show is ‘well, shit.’ But that’s exactly what we said after the new production of The Rage of Narcissus by Sergio Blanco, a thrilling, frightening, too gory, captivating performance that’s powerful in its elusiveness and its vague metaphors but also will leave you thinking wait…what? and HOW? The dreamy abstractions were somehow effective in making us feel what we were supposed to feel (horrified?) while simultaneously being unclear in what exactly they were and why. The show is a hazy whirlwind that mixes reality and fantasy and fiction and biography into a cautionary tale of some sort. However, what it’s cautioning against is unclear, partly in the good artsy way and partly in a bit of an unsatisfying way.
The Rage of Narcissus tells the story of how Sam Crane, the adept actor, came to play Sergio Blanco, the writer, but a character version of Sergio in this not-all-true (I mean obvs) autobiographical-but-fictionalized account of his time at an academic conference in Ljubljana, which is a horribly fun word to try to type accurately. It’s an extremely meta show, with Sam-the-actor-but-also-a-characterized-version-of-himself playing Sergio-the-writer-but-fictionalized and repeatedly breaking the fourth wall to tell us the ‘truth’ about the story’s events outside how he’s presenting it that there are really no remnants of a fourth wall to be found once the show begins. The construction of this production, with its great use of video and lighting, is one of the most distinguishing aspects of it, intriguing and mind-bending and ensuring that what’s happening onstage is never boring, often super funny, and always interesting.
And while clearly, in a show of this title (it’s a good title, as we’re told in the meta discussion of how Sam and Sergio came to land on it), you’d assume it’s about the pitfalls of narcissistic tendencies, they didn’t add up to enough to demand the action that occurs. That vagueness of what the what and huh why is fun for the artistic experience, but not so fun to wrap your head around afterwards. In a show that ostensibly deals with narcissism, vanity, ego, selfishness, something along those lines, the punishment for these traits is neither justified nor doled out to the representation of those traits. That would be the character Igor, the clear narcissist in the story, though he’s not the victim of it. Is he even real? (What’s GOING ON.) To punish the more obvious narcissist may be too easy, sure, and it is interesting to reflect on how Sam’s Sergio and Sam himself showed flickers of the ego-driven behaviors to be warned against, but it feels like a bit of a stretch to rely on that for the result and/or whatever message we’re to take from it. There are also the jabs at the selfishness of our society at large, represented by the few and far between but still jarring interjections about genuine global tragedies, which seemed too fragmentary to be meaningful.
And so the representation of the punishment just seems wrong, and disturbing, and disturbance just for its own sake and not for any good reason isn’t good enough. The particular scene where we find out what actually happened in Sergio’s hotel room in excruciating detail is unnecessarily gory. It added nothing and risked cheapening the work from being a sophisticated thriller to being akin to a low-grade snuff film.
Aside from that part (and the fact that if you had to drink every time you heard the line “and then we began to f*&k”, you would die from alcohol poisoning), it was still an enjoyably riveting show, with Crane giving a pretty fantastic performance. This show raises a bunch of interesting questions, throwing threads of ideas into the ether, although not fully holding on to one. I appreciate when good art is more about emotions than facts, but this started to veer a little too far into “don’t think about it too hard, too too hard” territory for me. However, it was never boring, and it’s very provocative, which is a great accomplishment for new weird theatre.
INFORMATION
The one act show is about 100 minutes (not the 90 billed). The lobby and bar were so packed I had trouble leaving the building, which isn’t a great feeling. Seats are unreserved so get there early for an aisle, but there are no bad seats. Bathrooms are gender neutral with about 3-5 stalls/cubicles each, downstairs in the bar area.
The show runs at the Pleasance Theatre (near Caledonian Road station) until March 8.
