Veganizing "Friends": Rachel's Birthday Flanby Randi / September 6, 2013
Lights up on Washington Heights
Up at the break of day
I wake up and I got this little punk I gotta chase away
Pop the grate at the crack of dawn
Sing while I wipe down the awning
Hey y’all, Good morning!
Up at the break of day
I wake up and I got this little punk I gotta chase away
Pop the grate at the crack of dawn
Sing while I wipe down the awning
Hey y’all, Good morning!
So begins “In The Heights”, the 2008 Tony-winning Broadway musical, gingerly but decisively setting the scene and bringing the audience into its world. It’s a bold open for this groundbreaking show, since many audience members are surprised by the nakedness – the main character, Usnavi, is talking directly to us, rapping to very little music, and it’s a bit startling. But by the time the music builds and more characters join in verse, you’re there with them in Washington Heights. It’s one of those opening numbers that actually gives you chills, if done well.
Luckily, the new production at Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre (WST) is indeed done well. With a cast of mainly Latino actors (thank goodness), this regional production of “In The Heights” impressed me in many ways, and almost made me stop thinking about the Broadway production.
The show tells the story of a tight-knit community in the Washington Heights-section of way-northern Manhattan, in a neighborhood primarily composed of Dominican immigrants. Those in the neighborhood all work hard and struggle to make ends meet, but they would do anything for their friends and neighbors, who are more like family. The local abuela is the neighborhood abuela, and when one of them suffers, they all suffer.
“In the heights
I flip the lights
And start my day
There are fights
And endless debts
And bills to pay”
“In The Heights”, written by the dream team of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegria Hudes, was a game changer when it debuted, like “Rent” was in its day. The style reflected modern times, with a score of rap and hip-hop, subverting what we took for granted about musical theatre while also paying tribute to it. If you were lucky enough to see the show on Broadway, especially with Miranda in the lead role, you know how hard it is to forget that experience, and the magic Miranda brought to it.
While I reminisced about Miranda’s unlimited charisma and talent a few times, the Walnut Street’s Usnavi, Perry Young, took over the role with aplomb. You miss some lines, as few people can spit out so many words as clearly as Miranda, but Young did an impressive job overall with the challenging role.
A few actors in the WST cast stunned me with their superb performances. Two supporting male characters, Benny and Sonny, respectively provide heart and comedy in the show, and it’s really important to cast actors who understand their characters’ sometimes unpleasant behavior. Rhett George as Benny was one of my favorite parts of this production, with his gorgeous voice and likability. You root for him even when he’s being kind of a jerk. Matthew J. Harris as Sonny was hilarious, and a few of his lines elicited the most laughter from the audience, thanks to his great comedic timing. The adorable Robin de Jesus played Sonny in the Broadway production, and while I love Robin, I don’t remember loving his Sonny as much as I did Harris’s.
While I reminisced about Miranda’s unlimited charisma and talent a few times, the Walnut Street’s Usnavi, Perry Young, took over the role with aplomb. You miss some lines, as few people can spit out so many words as clearly as Miranda, but Young did an impressive job overall with the challenging role.
A few actors in the WST cast stunned me with their superb performances. Two supporting male characters, Benny and Sonny, respectively provide heart and comedy in the show, and it’s really important to cast actors who understand their characters’ sometimes unpleasant behavior. Rhett George as Benny was one of my favorite parts of this production, with his gorgeous voice and likability. You root for him even when he’s being kind of a jerk. Matthew J. Harris as Sonny was hilarious, and a few of his lines elicited the most laughter from the audience, thanks to his great comedic timing. The adorable Robin de Jesus played Sonny in the Broadway production, and while I love Robin, I don’t remember loving his Sonny as much as I did Harris’s.
The wonderful set, plus heads in front of me (you can’t take pictures in the theatre; I had to be surreptitious!).
Rayanne Gonzales as Abuela Claudia was another standout, fully bringing the audience along on her character’s emotional arc. By the second act’s plot development, you feel, as the other characters do, as if she’s your abuela. My other favorite female character in this production was Nina, the smart girl who made it out of the barrio, played by Julia Hunter apparently in her professional debut. She is giving some performance as her debut! The Broadway cast featured the wonderful Mandy Gonzalez as Nina, and while you cannot really compare the two, I think Julia’s innocent take on the role affected me more.
One actor that stood out to me in a negative way was in the role of Daniela, because every time I looked at her she seemed to be making the same face – a big, wide-eyed smile. It just seemed off. Maybe this was the one case when original Broadway performer, the incredible Andrea Burns, was too much on my mind, but I think it’s at least in part a misstep in direction.
The real gripe I have with this production, that I wish they would work on ASAP, was that the sound seemed off! For a show that won the Tony for Best Orchestrations, the orchestrations for this production sometimes got in the way, and sometimes were lacking. For example, my favorite musical number in the show, “96,000”, features the characters taking turns in the first half rapping about what they’d do if they won the lottery, and then in the second half the backbeat builds behind the verses and then the full chorus belts into song. This climax gives legitimate chills even on the cast recording. However, in the WST production, I didn’t even realize this section had started until the song was over. You couldn’t hear the beat, you couldn’t hear Usnavi’s continued rap, and you somehow couldn’t hear the entire ensemble of the show singing the chorus. There are some serious sound issues if twenty-odd people singing the same thing couldn’t break through this strange din of confusion.
Even with these issues, the WST production is solid and definitely recommended. The overwhelmingly white, senior audience seemed to enjoy every moment of it, which pleased me to no end. “In The Heights” is a fresh, thrillingly modern show, enjoyed by anyone and everyone, and the WST is doing some fabulous work.
One actor that stood out to me in a negative way was in the role of Daniela, because every time I looked at her she seemed to be making the same face – a big, wide-eyed smile. It just seemed off. Maybe this was the one case when original Broadway performer, the incredible Andrea Burns, was too much on my mind, but I think it’s at least in part a misstep in direction.
The real gripe I have with this production, that I wish they would work on ASAP, was that the sound seemed off! For a show that won the Tony for Best Orchestrations, the orchestrations for this production sometimes got in the way, and sometimes were lacking. For example, my favorite musical number in the show, “96,000”, features the characters taking turns in the first half rapping about what they’d do if they won the lottery, and then in the second half the backbeat builds behind the verses and then the full chorus belts into song. This climax gives legitimate chills even on the cast recording. However, in the WST production, I didn’t even realize this section had started until the song was over. You couldn’t hear the beat, you couldn’t hear Usnavi’s continued rap, and you somehow couldn’t hear the entire ensemble of the show singing the chorus. There are some serious sound issues if twenty-odd people singing the same thing couldn’t break through this strange din of confusion.
Even with these issues, the WST production is solid and definitely recommended. The overwhelmingly white, senior audience seemed to enjoy every moment of it, which pleased me to no end. “In The Heights” is a fresh, thrillingly modern show, enjoyed by anyone and everyone, and the WST is doing some fabulous work.
Correction: The original version of this review named Karen Olivo as the original Nina, when it was Mandy Gonzalez. No more writing at midnight!
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“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.
Watch on the Rhine at the Donmar is the Best Play in London RN NL
(that means right now no lie)
Guys I had literally no idea what Watch on the Rhine was, so much so that every time I saw it in my calendar I thought that my husband was reminding us to watch something called “On the Rhine”. For like MONTHS. Very embarrassing for me, since it was a 1941 Lillian Hellman play (and 1943 movie) and I love Lillian Hellman but I guess that love was based on a very small too small sample size of her work. Regardless we stan a Jewish commie lady! This play came as you can see smack dabbadoo in the middle of World War II; Lillz was really like “gird your loins, world!” with this one.
We meet a rich family in D.C. whose grown daughter is coming back to her mother and old maid brother for the first time in 20 years after going to Europe and marrying a man named Kurt (OR IS HE) and having three amazing kids. They fled Germany probably because he’s prob Jewish and they might be (the names are! it’s unsaid! come on!) and really, it turns out, because he’s a professional anti-fascist and one of the top faces posted on Wanted signs around the Nazi offices. How it comes out is so good, with the old rich gramma being like ‘well we are all anti-fascist OBVIOUSLY’ (the obviously in the tone made me look around the audience to see who shifted uncomfortably) and the daughter was like ‘yeah well Kurt WORKS at it.’ So he’s on lists and shit and they had to flee and shit gets IN. TENSE. because there’s a Friend of Nazis named Teck (jfc) staying at the house who wants to cash in on what he knows.
Once I figured out whyyyy the leading lady, our Sara the returning daughter, was so familiar (it was because of It’s Complicated) (it’s a fantastic movie btw) (I really recommend it) (I love famous old people romcoms so much) I was fully taken into the drama and invested in the story. Sara and Kurt’s relationship was SO INTERESTING. They were madly in love with each other still but that was clearly predicated on having respect for each other as strong warriors for justice, so they were never gonna settle down and enjoy peace for a moment unforch no not ever. Teck (jfc) probably just sped up the process with the wrench he throws into their plans. This guy really does some excellent Nazi-friend acting, Naziing so hard in so many ways to play the bad guy but wow did he do it. The climactic scene where he explains calmly that he’s going to blackmail Kurt was SO tense and simmering so much that I think I actually gasped out loud when Kurt (finally) lunges for him and attacks him. (Actually…I think I said YES or LET’S GO so yeah I was REALLY INTO IT sorry (not sorry)). I love when Nazis get hurt! Here’s a great infographic that fits well here!
The cast was uniformly excellent (okay minus one but I’m not gonna name names), but what really struck me was how good the children were. Child actors are rarely tolerable, and no offense but what I’ve seen in this country is even worse than in the USA (I think it’s because of the West End’s child labor laws — there are too many protections, too many kids for each role, there’s no fear or suffering and you gotta have the fear for a good child actor.) (I am JOKING.) No but seriously these kids, especially the two boys, holy WOW. Some of the most believable, real, raw, honest acting I’ve seen in this CITY let alone from BABIES. In total awe. Poor little Bodo who was so smart and so funny and cute but still a baby, as they say, and poor little Joshua who acts so brave and so grown up because he has had to grow up too fast but he is still just a kid too. Ugh I’m gonna cry again give them all the awards it’s just not right that Back to the Future won an Olivier but not these kids. Also give them a hug.
Anyway considering how full-no-idea I was going in, I’m like full evangelical now about how strong this production of this super intense and smart and moving play is. If I gave star ratings I’d be giving five yellow ones.
