Yellow Face (2024) (Broadway)

We came for Daniel Dae Kim and was pleasantly surprised when Ryan Eggold from The Blacklist and New Amsterdam came on stage. I thought he looked familiar but I couldn't quite place him. I thought he might've just been a generic looking white guy they cast. Alas he was but a famous one at that. Funnily, he plays a macho white guy pretending to be Asian. The plot is hilarious with some genuine laughs. It cleverly blurs the line between reality and fiction, drawing from David Henry Hwang's own life. I love that meta plot. David and his father are two of the main characters. Francis Jue reprises his role as the father from the Off-Broadway run in 2007. Some 15 years later, Jue is older, perhaps a more convincing elderly Chinese father. I thought he was excellent. I saw Jue play Hwang himself in Soft Power a few years ago. I think time has probably served this play well. The thorny topics the play tackles are more germane now than ever in a post-Crazy Rich Asians, post-#OscarsSoWhite, post-Shang-Chi, post-Hamilton world. The play does need a lot of background context on Hwang's life. The small cast of seven feature actors who play multiple parts without regard to race or gender, while commenting hilariously on race-conscious casting. They recite lines from real (or we're at least led to believe they're real) articles to place us in context. It's a bit of a cheap conceit but it works. We enjoyed this very much! Lastly, the curtain call was super short. The small cast took their bows and they were off the stage in probably a minute, definitely no more than two. And it's not because the audience wasn't applauding. They were just really brief.
 

Once Upon a Mattress (Encores!) (2024)

What a cast they've assembled for Encores! now in its 30th year. Honestly, it's a shame it's only going to run for two weeks, though even that is long by City Center (beautiful ornate theater) standards. Everyone is perfectly cast to type. I'd say special standouts are J Harrison Ghee whose beautiful singing voice and singular stage presence is readily apparent, Sutton Foster good as always, Harriet Harris as the overbearing mother/queen with a regal British accent, Michael Urie as the naive princeling, and Cheyenne Jackson as the dimwitted knight really into his spurs. Sutton Foster's entrance about thirty minutes in is greeted with a huge applause and her big number Shy is a showstopper. I didn't really have any familiarity with the show but I was pleasantly surprised to find a very funny script and catchy songs. There is a lot of physical comedy too, probably not written in, such as Foster re-adjusting atop the mattresses and Urie rolling up the stairs. It's a fun show I recommend, a steal really for $28. The balcony is super far and high (at 5 flights up), but you can still pretty much see everything save for the back of the orchestra (and one scene of smaller physical comedy that I couldn't make out what Foster was doing).

Soft Power (Off-Broadway) (2018)

Soft Power is a musical within a play written by David Henry Hwang after a traumatic experience (or rather two related ones). He is actually a character in this semi-autobiographical piece. It is a satire, an inverted retelling of The King and I set in 2016 America, a strange and tumultuous land. Hillary Clinton plays the inverted would-be king, and Xing Xue is a Chinese expat who plays "I", the protagonist in a yellow savior love story (would love for Hillary to see this). It is so much funnier than I expected. And the music and choreography are actually pretty good. Hwang turns his anger into an intelligent story about Chinese and American culture. It is full of sharp observations about us. Some of the punch lines hurt a little considering we're still in the mess of 2016 but that only makes the themes more relevant.  I don't know how the production has changed since the middling reviews from its premiere in California but I thoroughly enjoyed the show.  The predominantly Asian cast is delightful.