My wife and I did one of our Broadway blitzes last week, flying to New York to see four plays. This week, I’m posting reviews of them…
We plan trips like this a couple of months ahead of time and always choose new shows we don’t know a lot about other than who will appear in them and a plot described in a sentence or two.
Three of the plays had no intermission, two were semi-autobiographical, two of them featured stars of the old TV series “ER,” and one of them had two dogs that stole attention from the actors.
The best of the shows was “Yellow Face,” written by David Henry Hwang. We knew his name because, in February 1988, we saw his “M. Butterfly” in its pre-Broadway run at the National Theater in Washington, starring John Lithgow and BD Wong. I enjoyed it so much I hung around the stage door afterwards to ask Lithgow if he’d guest on my radio show the next morning — which he did. The play went on to run two years on Broadway, win a Tony, and be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
“M. Butterfly” announced Hwang as a major new talent, and he used that celebrity the next year to express his disappointment in the casting of Jonathan Pryce as the Vietnamese pimp in “Miss Saigon.” Hwang’s disapproval got a lot of vocal support from the Asian community and the theater union Actor’s Equity, which tried to bar Pryce from reprising the role on Broadway. Their complaint wasn’t just that Pryce is a white man from Wales, but that he wore eye prosthetics and bronzing cream to look Asian. In the end, Pryce did stay in the role, and the musical played for years and years.
That was far from the first occurrence of such casting, which came to be known as Yellow Face. In 1930s movies, Chinese detective Charlie Chan was played by Swedish actor Warner Oland. Mickey Rooney looked ridiculous as Mr. Yunioshi in 1961’s “Breakfast At Tiffany’s.” David Carradine was cast as the lead in the 1970s TV show “Kung Fu” — instead of Bruce Lee.
In “Yellow Face,” Hwang recalls the “Miss Saigon” controversy and the irony of the huge mistake he made when he accidentally cast white actor Marcus G. Dahlman as the Asian lead in his next play, “Face Value.” Recognizing his error too late, Hwang was unable to fire the performer just because of his race — and then made things worse by lying about Dahlman’s supposed Asian ancestry. On top of his hypocrisy and attempts to cover it up, “Face Value” was a major flop, losing two million dollars and being described by one critic as “M. Turkey.”
But that whole story made for a very funny farce in “Yellow Face.” Hwang not only wrote himself as the lead character to tell his tale, but also purposely cast a half-dozen actors — many of whom play multiple roles — to play the supporting characters without regard to race or gender. In particular, Marinda Anderson, though Black, played a riotous version of the white actress Jane Krakowski.
The other thing that attracted us to “Yellow Face” was that it starred Daniel Dae Kim, who we knew from “Lost.” However, that morning, we received a phone call from the theater informing us Kim wouldn’t perform that day, but his understudy, Paul Juhn, would take the lead. If we lived in the New York area and could reschedule for another performance, we would have, but that wasn’t an option since we were only in town for a few days.
We ran into a similar situation five years ago when we went to see Laura Benanti as Eliza in “My Fair Lady” at Lincoln Center, only to discover she and the guy who played Henry Higgins wouldn’t be there. Fortunately, understudies Kerstin Anderson and Michael Halling were fabulous (as was Norbert Leo Butz as Alfie Doolittle). You can read my review of that production here.
As for “Yellow Face,” a friend of my wife told her afterwards that she had seen Kim in the play and felt he was wrong for the part, unable to pull off the very light touch necessary to make the farce work. On the other hand, Juhn gave a very deft performance which had us laughing out loud several times. The other actor who deserves mention was stage veteran Francis Jue, who stole every scene he was in as Hwang’s father, a role he played in the original 2007 Off-Broadway production, for which he won an Obie. I won’t be surprised if he’s nominated for a Tony.
All in all, we “Yellow Face” marked a good start to our Broadway blitz.
Tomorrow: my review of Jez Butterworth’s “The Hills Of California.”