Poor Yella Rednecks (2023) (Manhattan Theatre Club)

Qui Nguyen's play Poor Yella Rednecks is something of a sequel to his 2016 play Vietgone. It's independent enough that you don't have to have seen the earlier play but there is one direct reference in the dialogue, and many of the actors actually reprise their earlier roles in this play. Nguyen writes himself into this play about his mother's struggles and raising him in rural Arkansas after fleeing Vietnam as refugees. Though specific to the Vietnamese American experience, the themes will resonate with any immigrant audience. It's not exactly haha funny but there is some clever writing. Nguyen plays with the stage play as a form, writing his mother speaking Vietnamese in perfect English while writing the white characters speaking nonsense, the way his mother hears them. It's a clever inversion that works on stage where there are no subtitles. The play is actually delivered with several "songs" that are really more like slam poetry. The beats are somewhat generic, and the lyrics are kind of cheesy and don't all really rhyme, but the awkwardness is sort of endearing. I thought that it was maybe a one-off experiment, but apparently Nguyen played with this style before. It's only the closing song that has melody, the rest is pure spoken word rap, which you don't typically associate with Vietnamese refugees. The lead Maureen Sebastian is fantastic as the mother. She plays a romantic lead and a poor single mother at once and nails both tones. I also loved the set featuring the letters YELLA, the Americana signs framing the stage, and comic book style. There are two cool stage combat kung fu scenes. And the playwright as a child is played by a puppet who emotes and fights pretty realistically. I quite enjoyed the play, and would like to see Vietgone. More different Asian American stories and innovative storytelling on stage please.

Here Lies Love (Broadway) (2023)

After seeing the immersive staging of Guys and Dolls on the West End, I was very excited to see the transformation of the Broadway Theatre for Here Lies Love. I unfortunately came down with Covid for the second time just the August weekend I had bought tickets for. Morgan went in my place and saw Lea Salonga. Luckily I was able to see it still before the show closes at the end of the month. 

The marketing for this show has seemingly not reached the general public. Any time I tell someone I'm going to see Here Lies Love, they ask what's that and then give a dumbfounded stare when I say "the David Byrne immersive disco musical about Imelda Marcos". Yes, this show's very existence is kind of bizarre. The premise is that reportedly Imelda was known to have partied it up at Studio 54, and so they recreate the atmosphere of a discotheque. The music is by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, and I'll say it is recognizably in the weird/cool/kind-of-catchy style of The Talking Heads (American Troglodyte especially). None of the music, save for the title song, is especially memorable/hummable but it works. The immersion is cool, but I think not quite as well executed as Guys and Dolls. The stage doesn't rise and fall, rather it rotates and so the audience moves around clockwise with it. And it's quite crowded like a nightclub such that you can't move around as much. And there is actually a proper front where the stage would normally be since the balcony still has seats. It's not actually in the round. I did like the use of live footage though. The all-Filipino cast is beautiful--a wonderful Broadway first. The dance parts were fun too, maybe less so in a seat but I had a grand ole time. 

There is a valid question to ask about whether the show glorifies Imelda. I think it starts in a way that kind of does. The crowd cheers at the election of Ferdinand Marcos and decries Ninoy Acquino's dismissal of Imelda as being too tall (Also, I need a fact check on that because it's unbelievable that Imelda was courted by both Acquino and Marcos). But the show certainly ends on the right side of history. Ninoy Acquino dies a martyr and calls out the rampant corruption and horrors of martial law. And the show ends with two poignant songs: an elegy sung for Ninoy by his mother and an acoustic sung by the DJ to lyrics set to real accounts from the People Power Revolution. I think it's also interesting to note that the concept album dates back to 2010, predating the ascensions of Bong Bong Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump. The show takes on a different urgency in 2023. It urges us to learn from history because we keep on forgetting.