Archives for October 25, 2019

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I review the off-Broadway opening of Soft Power. Here’s an excerpt.

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Talk about timing: “Soft Power,” the new David Henry Hwang-Jeanine Tesori musical about Chinese-American cultural diplomacy, has opened at the exact moment when relations between the Trump administration and mainland China have become impossibly fraught. The deftness with which Mr. Hwang and Ms. Tesori juggle reality and fantasy can’t help but put you in mind of the real world, in which two deeply dissimilar cultures, one of them a democracy weathering a populist convulsion and the other an order-worshipping authoritarian state, seek to come to profitable terms with each other.

If that doesn’t sound much like a good old-fashioned Broadway musical…well, neither did Stephen Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures” back in 1976. And while I’m not quite ready to call “Soft Power” a Sondheim-quality masterpiece after a single viewing, I can already say that I don’t remember when I last saw a musical that was this smart—and touching.

Mr. Hwang and Ms. Tesori describe “Soft Power” as “a play with a musical.” DHH (Francis Jue), the protagonist of the play, is Mr. Hwang, more or less, and the musical around which the play is wrapped is a fevered dream that he has after being stabbed in the neck by a thug and nearly dying (which really happened to Mr. Hwang). In the show, DHH is invited by Xūe Xíng (Conrad Ricamora), a Shanghai theatrical producer, to turn a hit Chinese movie romcom called “Stick to Your Mistake” (yes, it’s imaginary, and it sounds better in Chinese) into a Broadway musical that will be, like Mr. Hwang’s own “Aida,” a “world-wide smash.” DHH doesn’t find the proposition practical: In the film, a married couple pulled apart by love decides to stay together instead of pursuing individual happiness, a Chinese-style denouement that is nothing like that of a Broadway show. Still, a job’s a job, so he goes to work anyway, discovering in the process that Xūe is caught up in an extramarital relationship similar to the one portrayed in “Stick to Your Mistake.”…

That’s where the musical comes in. What Xūe wants DHH to do is write a show that will persuade Western viewers of the superiority of the Chinese way. “What a truly great civilization achieves,” he explains, “is ‘soft power’—through our ideas, inventions, culture—to change the way people think.” This, Xūe believes, is what such great Broadway musicals of the past as “The King and I” have done, and his hope is that “Stick to Your Mistake” will similarly “bring Chinese values to the world.”

So what kind of musical does DHH dream up in his delirium? A crazy parody of “The King and I” in which Xūe and Zoe (Alyse Alan Louis), his American mistress, play the principal characters….

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Read the whole thing here.

A montage of scenes from Soft Power:

In the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal, I review an off-Broadway revival of Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney. Here’s an excerpt.

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“Molly Sweeney,” Brian Friel’s 1994 play about a 41-year-old woman blind from early childhood onward whose sight is unexpectedly restored by surgery, hasn’t been done in New York since the Irish Repertory Theatre’s superb 2011 production. Now Keen Company, one of my favorite off-Broadway troupes, is presenting a small-scale revival of this three-hander that is noteworthy for an unusual piece of casting: Pamela Sabaugh, the first low-vision actor ever to play Molly, is reprising the groundbreaking performance she gave at Philadelphia’s Amaryllis Theatre Company 12 years ago, this time in a version staged by Jonathan Silverstein, Keen’s artistic director. I didn’t see Ms. Sabaugh in Philadelphia, but it’s hard to imagine anything better than her calm, centered acting as the Molly of this production, who discovers that the world of sight she was once forced to imagine is not so miraculous as she had always supposed.

I was struck by the subtlety with which Ms. Sabaugh and Mr. Silverstein bring out an aspect of the play that was not fully clear to me when I first saw it: Strong as she seems to be, Molly is in truth a victim, a woman to whom men do things for reasons of their own….

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Read the whole thing here.

Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums every weekday in the order in which I first heard them.

9. The Beatles, The Beatles (Apple)

I knew a certain amount about the Beatles when I first heard the White Album, as The Beatles is universally known, in 1969. Like all my elementary-school classmates, I’d seen them on The Ed Sullivan Show, and even though I had yet to purchase my first full-fledged rock album, I’d since been introduced to a fair number of their singles by listening to the radio and watching the animated-cartoon series called The Beatles that ran on ABC every Saturday morning from 1965 to 1969. It wasn’t very good—in fact, it was perfectly awful—but some of the songs, “Paperback Writer” and “Penny Lane” in particular, did catch my ear. Even so, I wouldn’t have called myself a Beatles fan: I was much more interested in Tchaikovsky, Judy Collins, and $64,000 Jazz.

Then, however, came “Revolution.” No sooner did I hear it on the radio than I went right out and bought the single, the B side of “Hey Jude.” As the ear-shattering introductory fuzz-guitar riff blasted out of the cheap little record player in my bedroom, I connected for the first time with rock as a present-tense music. To put it another way, I now understood that rock and roll was the music of my generation, just as $64,000 Jazz had been the music of my parents’ generation. The difference, of course, was that I liked both kinds of music—and still do.

The White Album came out three months later, but I couldn’t afford a double album, so I borrowed Bob Nelson’s copy early in 1969 and spent the next few weeks starting to get a grip on its proliferating stylistic variety. It didn’t yet occur to me that the Beatles I had known and briefly loved no longer existed: I simply took it for granted that the White Album, like its predecessors, was the product of a genuine group effort. It wasn’t, of course, which explains why I loved some of the songs and didn’t much care for certain others, as well as why there were more than a few, “Helter Skelter” and “Revolution 9” in particular, that I didn’t get at all.

I went through a long stretch of not listening to the Beatles in college. It wasn’t until their albums started to be transferred on CD that I returned to their music and decided that in fact I still loved it. A few years later, I wrote an essay for Commentary in which, after much thought, I set down what I had to say about them:

After the Beatles, rock-and-roll would never be the same. What started out as a stripped-down, popularized blending of country music and rhythm-and-blues intended for consumption by middle-class teenagers evolved into a new musical dialect in which it was possible to make statements complex and thoughtful enough to seize and hold the attention of adult listeners….

Neither virtuoso instrumentalists nor pure songwriters, they instead explored the possibilities of the hybrid art of the record album as art object more successfully than any other popular musicians of their generation. For this—and for the beauty of their best music—they will be remembered.

I’ll stand on that, and on my after-the-fact conclusion that Revolver was the best thing they ever did. That said, the White Album is also full of good things, and though I doubt I’ll ever feel the need to listen to it all the way through again, few months go by when I don’t put on “Back in the U.S.S.R.” or “Blackbird” or “Julia” and marvel at what the Beatles could do when the stars were in phase.

(To be continued)

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“Back in the U.S.S.R.,” from The Beatles:

The video for the single version of “Revolution,” directed by Michael Lindsey-Hogg and filmed on September 4, 1968:

The “Penny Lane” episode of The Beatles, which originally aired in 1967:

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To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

To read about album #4, go here.

To read about album #5, go here.

To read about album #6, go here.

To read about album #7, go here.

To read about album #8, go here.

Shura Cherkassky plays Igor Stravinsky’s Circus Polka: For a Young Elephantas an encore at a 1995 recital. This piece was originally commissioned by the Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1942 to accompany a “ballet” for fifty elephants that was choreographed by George Balanchine:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“The monomaniac is unlikely to succeed. Most leave only their bleached bones in the roadless desert. But the rest of us, with multiple interests instead of one single mission, are certain to fail and to have no impact at all.”

Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander