‘ Soft Power’ gets to heart of postelection America
Lively, textured ‘ play with a musical’ speaks to Trump era
Maybe we can finally retire the canard that dismisses musical theater as saccharine piffle. In the 21st century, the art form’s most exciting, most innovative specimens are so smart they’re cunning, applying the genre’s tropes and tools toward new, sly ends. Yet those that will endure don’t merely engage in self- parody, taking mean- spirited potshots at musical theater’s most flamboyant conventions. They achieve much more. They still have heart. “Soft Power,” the new David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori “play with a musical” that opened Thursday, June 21, at the Curran, is a daring new entrant in that tradition. Co- commissioned by Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles and the Public Theater still use in some New tweaks, York, it but could it nonetheless deserves to be known as one of the defining theatrical works of the Trump era and have a long, rich life thereafter. Directed by Leigh Silverman, the show begins not as a musical but as a straight play set in 2016, as Chinese American playwright David ( an avatar for Hwang and played by Francis Jue) negotiates with Chinese television executive Xue Xing ( Conrad Ricamora) over the proper way to represent China and its citizens in a pilot. Is the American mode of storytelling — with selfish, true- love-chasing characters as opposed to selfless ones — the only way to make a TV show not seem like state propaganda and succeed
beyond China’s borders?
If that sounds reductive, the book also strains in the next scene, when Xue’s white American girlfriend, Zoe ( Alyse Alan Louis), is conveniently overeager to tout the virtues of American democracy to Xue ( they’re at a Hillary Clinton campaign rally) or whites plain “The King and I” to David. Hwang then takes more shortcuts, using direct address narration out of nowhere and setting up a fainting, it- was- all- a- dream sequence.
But when the orchestra, under the direction of David O, finally swells in, the show takes off. And bless the producers of “Soft Power” for investing in an actual orchestra, complete with six violins, instead of the synth- heavy, four- person bands that so many shows try to pass off as orchestras these days. “Soft Power” is infinitely more textured and grand and potent for the fullness of sound that only a slew of strings and winds and brass can create. It also complements Ricamora particularly well; his singing offers a reminder that the human voice is an instrument, one out of which he massages, as might a violinist, a sumptuous vibrato.
The music has taken over, because we’re no longer in 2016, but years later, as future generations have mythologized the events of the first scenes as a Chinese musical — one not from David’s point of view, as in the initial scenes of “Soft Power,” but from Xue’s. In this era, China dominates not just as a military and economic power, but also as a cultural one. In its art, it can put forth the sweeping generalizations and gross inaccuracies that American entertainment routinely propagates.
The result is a hilarious, much- deserved comeuppance. Xue flies in to “Hollywood Airport.” The Asian American ensemble wears blond wigs, speaks in Southern drawls and slings AK- 47s. Just as Americans bastardize other cultures’ art forms, so does this musical- within- a- play get musical theater wrong. A single dance number might combine the hand jive of “Grease” with break dance, a kick line and bucking bronco riding a la Agnes de Mille. ( Sam Pinkleton choreographed the brilliantly spastic pastiche.)
The goal of “Soft Power,” though, isn’t just to make fun of the United States but also to dissect the 2016 election, detoxify us, and offer a path forward. It makes the unassailable case that Clinton ( also Louis, with a belt that could rejigger the electoral college) might have fared slightly better in 2016 had she strode into her rallies atop giant cheeseburgers — but that she still probably wouldn’t have won.
It also finds in a postelection Clinton a beacon of hope. With a mouth full of pizza or dribbling ice cream a radioactive shade of green, she staggers up, a phoenix rising from the ashes, proclaiming she still believes in democracy and in love and in us. Early on, “Soft Power” briefly makes fun of “Oklahoma!” — but the new show and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s groundbreaking classic share a mainspring. Both seek, in the midst of a crisis, to help rebuild a nation.