Bette Midler used to titillate audiences by asking if they knew what you get when you cross an onion with a donkey. The answer to her question was simple: Sometimes you get a smelly vegetable with a pair of large ears but on nights when the moon is full and you're really lucky, you might end up with a really sweet piece of ass that just makes you want to cry!
One could contrast RuPaul's enthusiastic "Yas Kween!" with Queen Victoria's severely disapproving "We are not amused" or search for the musical equivalent to Michelle Obama's credo: 'When they go low, we go high."
This much is for sure: A sea of mediocrity exists between such extreme responses. Two world premiere productions currently gracing San Francisco stages offer vivid examples of live theatre at its very best -- and its equally impressive worst.
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Custom Made Theatre and Just Theatre have joined forces to co-produce the world premiere of Good. Better. Best. Bested., Jonathan Spector's execrable 90-minute mishmash in which a lot of screaming, running, puking, and limping provides the theatrical glue that holds together a handful of poignant encounters with sporadic spurts of dramatic diarrhea. Tourists roam the Las Vegas Strip taking duck-faced selfies at every opportunity. A local steps on broken glass with his bare feet. By the time the play ends, one feels as if a puddle of vomit has spent enough time on the floor to achieve room temperature. |
| Mike Mize portrays a Las Vegas magician in a scene from Good. Better. Best. Bested. (Photo by: Jay Yamada) |
In the spirit of "hate the sin, but love the sinners," let me state that the cast includes several local actors whose work I have greatly admired (Mick Mize, Jessica Lea Risco, Tim Garcia, and Gabriel Montoya). They all deserve better material than this, which comes as quite a surprise considering that the playwright's Eureka Day made such a strong impression when the Aurora Theatre Company produced its world premiere in April. The promotional blurb for GBBB's landscape of losers describes Spector's play as:
"...a one-night journey down the Las Vegas Strip, an interwoven story of bachelorettes, magicians, street performers, gamblers, and tourists. As the nighttime festivities get under way, an earth-shattering event happens half a world away. In the midst of this tragedy and the chaos it unleashes, the characters must reckon with how much to let it disturb their good time."
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| Gabriel Montoya (Centurion) and Tim Garcia (Septimus) in a scene from Good. Better. Best. Bested. (Photo by: Jay Yamada) |
The tragedy in question is not Spector's play, but the spectre of a nuclear holocaust which has killed millions of people in India. In between an obnoxious gaggle of drunk party girls, a jaded magician (Mike Mize) spends some quiet moments chatting with a woman who has been bullied into walking someone else's comfort dog but, in a moment of self-centered weakness, has let the dog get run over by oncoming traffic. Mize reappears later in the play as a Trumpian "bro" who insists that Americans will fight for their right to party.
In another scene, a newly-widowed Midwestern businessman tries to show the hooker he has hired the favorable review she received on Yelp that convinced him to contact her upon arriving in town. While the clock keeps ticking, Alan (Gabriel Montoya) takes time to check his email despite his frustrations with the hotel's spotty wi-fi connection and the disconcerting news about a horrific tragedy with global repercussions. After listening to Simone (Jessica Lea Risco) call home to leave a poignant message for her family, he nevertheless asks her for a blow job.
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| Gabriel Montoya (Alan) and Jessica Lea Risco (Simone) in a scene from Good. Better. Best. Bested. (Photo by: Jay Yamada) |
Meanwhile, Simone's husband, Walter (David Sinaiko), is trying to spend some time with his estranged son, Sheldon (Tim Garcia). A gambling addict and deadbeat dad who tries to earn money as a street performer, Walter has just been mugged by some tourists and is in the embarrassing position of having to ask his son for $900 so he can have his car fixed. An aggressive card shark hopped up on cocaine, Sheldon wants to eat at a sushi joint that's supposed to have the best fish in town but will require a 40-minute taxi ride to get there.
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| David Sinaiko (Walter) and Jessica Tim Garcia (Sheldon) in a scene from Good. Better. Best. Bested. (Photo by: Jay Yamada) |
The production has been designed by Randy Wong-Westbrooke with handsome projections by Teddy Hulsker, lighting by Sophia Craven, and costumes by Brooke Jennings. Director Lauren English handles the dramatic moments with admirable sensitivity while Lauren Garcia and Millie Brooks join Sinaiko, Montoya, Risco, Mize, and Tim Garcia in juggling a wide variety of costumes and characters. A hat tip to Christian Cagigal, the professional magician who coached Mize on his character's feats of legerdemain.
If anything can be learned from Good. Better. Best. Bested. it's that one needn't go abroad to find today's Ugly Americans. There are plenty of deplorables acting deplorably on any given day in Las Vegas and, if there's a choice between surrealist art and instant gratification, selfishness will always win out. Performances of Good. Better. Best. Bested. continue at the Custom Made Theatre through July 7 (click here for tickets).
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The evolution of Soft Power (the thrilling new musical by David Henry Hwang with a 22-piece ensemble playing Jeanine Tesori' musical score) is notable for how current events helped to shape and mold the final product. Hwang points to The King and I as one source of inspiration. The importance of China's growth as a world power and the 2016 Presidential election (in which Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton) are also key factors shaping the show. As the playwright explains:“I like the premise of The King and I, the idea that you have this English woman who goes to Siam and teaches the king how to rule his own country. The artistry is so great and so beautifully done that, by the end of it, I’m still in tears. It’s this very complicated, contradictory feeling that I think a lot of us are familiar with from seeing something that you know is incorrect, inauthentic, maybe racist, maybe sexist, but done so well. I wanted to try to see if that experience could be created for a mainstream American audience. That’s when I started to think about Soft Power as a play with music.”
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| Conrad Ricamora (Xue Xing) and Alyse Alan Louis (Hillary Clinton) in a scene from Soft Power (Photo by: Craig Schwartz) |
"The term ‘soft power’ is generally attributed to the political scientist Joseph Nye and refers to a nation’s intellectual, cultural, and artistic influence. You think of America as a country that, through most of the 20th century, was a hard power -- an economic and military power. But there was soft power, too -- a sort of ideal story about American values (whether they’re actually practiced or not). It was a great story, and through our musicals, movies, and television shows, it traveled around the world. China is a country that doesn’t have a lot of soft power. Changing that has been an explicit goal of their government for at least ten years now."
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| Conrad Ricamora (Xue Xing) and Francis Jue (DHH) in a scene from Soft Power (Photo by: Craig Schwartz) |
In this sumptuously scored new musical co-commissioned by the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles, New York's Public Theatre, and Carole Shorenstein's Curran, Conrad Ricamora appears as Xue Xing, a Chinese producer eager to use musical theatre as the "delivery system" that can enhance China's image on the world stage. In his initial meeting with a Chinese-American writer named DHH (an acronym for David Henry Hwang), he realizes that almost everything DHH knows about China is based on tired old stereotypes promulgated by Western media. DHH has no concept of what a place like Shanghai's historic Fuxing Park means to the Chinese or how to work with Chinese censors to produce the kind of art that can be seen in China.
If musicals like 1776 (book by Peter Stone with music and lyrics by Sherman Edwards) and Lin-Manuel Miranda's blockbuster, Hamilton, were able to get millions of theatregoers interested in American history, Soft Power may hold the key to helping audiences understand how China and many other nations view today's United States as a corrupt and violent culture in which political operatives rely on show business to shape and deliver their views while enjoying the perks produced by a gullible populace that has been brainwashed with slick marketing techniques.
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| Alyse Alan Louis as Hillary Clinton in a scene from Soft Power (Photo by: Craig Schwartz) |
Hwang's satire plays out broadly in an unlikely musical number about the Electoral College ("Election Night") as well as a symposium set 50 years in the future during which the lone American voice (a professor from Stanford University) politely suggests that China's cultural appropriation of musical comedy as an art form ignores its true roots in American culture.
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| Raymond Lee portrays "a good guy with a gun" in a scene from Soft Power (Photo by Craig Schwartz) |
Magnficently directed by Leigh Silverman (with choreography by Sam Pinkleton and sound design by Kai Harada), Soft Power delivers a dizzying experience that rapidly moves across the stage without an ounce of fat in need of trimming. David Zinn's iconoclastic scenic design is beautifully lit by Mark Barton, with Anita Yavich's costumes often evoking spontaneous laughter from the audience.
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| Conrad Ricamora (Xue Xing) and Kendyl Ito (Jing) in a scene from Soft Power (Photo by: Craig Schwartz) |
Soft Power's ultimate goal is to make audiences think about the mythology we create about ourselves, our culture, our history and how we pass those beliefs down from one generation to another. During many moments I was blown away by the cinematic sweep of Jeanine Tesori's score as it propelled the narrative forward. At other times I found Conrad Ricamora's charming breakout performance simply irresistible. Among those who shine in supporting roles are Austin Ku as Bobby Bob, Raymond J. Lee as an American Vice-President who boasts about being "a good guy with a gun," Jon Hoche doubling as Tony Manero and the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and Francis Jue as DHH.
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| Conrad Ricamora stars as Xue Xing in Soft Power (Photo by: Craig Schwartz) |
There is so much to learn from and admire in Soft Power that many theatregoers will want to see the show at least one more time to make sure they caught everything happening onstage (Hwang's intricate script leapfrogs 50 years into the future and returns to the present with a dazzling acrobatic audacity). Anyone who sees this musical is sure to wonder what will be going through Hillary Clinton's mind if and when she attends a performance as she watches Alyse Alan Louis's bravura performance as an enhanced vision of Clinton singing and dancing her way through a crushing political defeat and sensing a momentary spark of romantic interest toward a Chinese businessman.
Unlike the two Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals which previously dealt with Asian characters (1951's The King and I and 1958's Flower Drum Song), this is one show that doesn't rely on a secondary love story. In 2018, we've come a long way from the overt Orientalism of The Small House of Uncle Thomas and, as Hammerstein might say, that is indeed "Something Wonderful." Having worked his own life-threatening crisis into the show's script, Hwang stresses another reason to justify the creation of Soft Power:
“For a long time I was the only even nominally Chinese person who had ever written a Broadway show, so I would get approached by a lot of Chinese producers saying, ‘Oh, we have this show that’s big in Xi’an, and if you just tweak a few things, it would be a big hit on Broadway, too.’ None of those proposals ever really came to anything, but I began to question this whole dichotomy between a country that ostensibly wants soft power, wants great hit movies, wants Broadway shows, but also is very top-down in terms of its control over culture and what we would call censorship. As an American, I‘m thinking: How can you have a censored culture and produce things the world wants to see? But maybe that’s just an American point of view, because one could also argue that you shouldn’t be able to have an economy like China’s, either -- one that is that controlled, and has still done as well as it has in the last 20 to 30 years. And from there, the concept just got bigger and bigger.”
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| Francis Jue as DHH in a scene from Soft Power (Photo by: Craig Schwartz) |
It's quite possible that Soft Power will draw as much international attention as Hamilton (Tesori's score is especially compelling in songs like "Fuxing Park," "I'm With Her," "Happy Enough," "The New Silk Road," and its anthem-like finale, "Democracy"). I don't doubt that it will attract a sizable Asian-American audience and that help spur more employment opportunities for Asian-American actors. I sincerely hope this show lives long and prospers after it reaches New York.
Performances of Soft Power continue at the Curran Theatre through July 8 (click here for tickets). Here's the trailer:
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