New musical ‘Soft Power’ at The Curran has delightfully offbeat flavor.
Semi-musical at the Curran serves up a rollicking spoof of America
There’s something delightfully offbeat about “Soft Power,” the “play with a musical” that Center Theatre Group has brought to the Curran theater in San Francisco, fresh from its world premiere in Los Angeles.
A first-time collaboration between playwright David Henry Hwang (“M. Butterfly”) and composer Jeanine Tesori (“Fun Home”), “Soft Power” is adeptly staged by Leigh Silverman, who directed both Hwang’s “Chinglish” and Tesori’s “Violet” on Broadway.
It starts as a savvy comedy about Hwang meeting with a Chinese producer about a possible sitcom in Shanghai. Even the smallest details are being picked apart to weed out anything that could possibly be seen as implying that China has flaws.
San Francisco native Francis Jue (who was in Hwang’s “M. Butterfly” and Tesori’s “Thoroughly Modern Millie” on Broadway, as well as TheatreWorks’ 2009 production of Hwang’s “Yellow Face”) portrays the playwright with an impish confidence. Conrad Ricamora (of TV’s “How to Get Away with Murder”) plays producer Xue Xing with a stoic reserve and dry humor that soon gives way to bewildered earnestness.
The play is set in 2016, characterized by a brief offstage encounter with campaigning Hillary Clinton and a heated debate
about the messy virtues and drawbacks of democracy. It also features a very funny discussion about “The King and I” between Hwang and Xue’s outspoken blond American girlfriend, played with assuredness by Alyse Alan Louis. “The King and I” also functions as a kind of in-joke, because Ricamora, Jue and others in the cast have performed in it.
Barely a half-hour into the show, a sudden traumatic event (no, not the election, but something that actually happened to Hwang around that time) abruptly shifts the story into a musical — and not just any musical, but a popular Chinese one a hundred years from now depicting a bizarrely mythologized distortion of the story we’ve just seen. Xue is unquestionably the hero of this story, not only helping Hwang work through an identity crisis but going on to save the world.
The musical’s vision of America is hilariously warped, full of gun-toting desperados and meth bars. Everyone is blond, which is a funny touch in itself with the almost entirely AsianAmerican cast. There’s one particularly priceless scene in a fancy-dress McDonald’s with roller-skating waiters. Even David Zinn’s set suddenly gets deeper when the show shifts from play to musical, the shallow, somewhat claustrophobic backgrounds opening to up to make room for dancing.
With lyrics by Hwang and music and additional lyrics by Tesori, the musical numbers are a delightful pastiche of classic Broadway, from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim and beyond, deftly played by the orchestra under the direction of David O. With a tantalizing tipof-your-tongue tang of familiarity, the songs seem as if they must have been as much of a blast to create as they are to behold.
Choreographed by Sam Pinkleton, Louis’ desperate-to-please dance number as candidate Clinton is a tour de force in itself. Louis’ Hillary also tears the roof off the place with a passionate paean to democracy that seems comically misguided in context but stirringly sincere when reprised by the ensemble.
Austin Ku is a comically recurring gun-toting defender as Bobby Bob, who seems to pop out of nowhere whenever there’s a standoff. Jon Hoche explains our complicated election system with hysterical gusto as the Chief Justice, and Raymond J. Lee plays a maniacally violent Veep. Maria-Christina Oliveras is a zealously protective campaign manager, and Kendyl Ito a reluctantly dutiful daughter.
The segues in and out of the musical are surprisingly blunt, but it’s a marvelously clever look at America through a different lens, even if whatever hope it offers for our country going forward comes off as almost quixotic.