"Soft Power" at Curran Theatre

Curran Theatre production photo by Craig Schwartz Photography

The renovated Curran Theatre continues to attract interesting shows since it broke off from the SHN company that brings most of the touring Broadway shows to San Francisco. You never quite know what you're going to get. Most recently, it was a new play by writer David Henry Hwang and composer Jeanine Tesori called Soft Power. This one is a little hard to describe because it is so unusual.

Not only has Hwang written himself into the play as a character, but he and Tesori have inserted a musical into the middle of the play. That's pretty cool, but even more so because of how clever and subversive the whole thing is. But I get ahead of myself....

The Play

We start with a scene that seems like something out of Hwang's earlier play, Chinglish, which was about business people having problems communicating across American and Chinese cultures. But in this case, the character "DHH" is an American playwright pitching a script to a Chinese producer, Xue Xing, whose company is trying to break into the US market. The exec wants something like "Sex in the City," but where the city is Shanghai and the content is Chinese, not just in language, but culturally. There ensues a discussion of what it means to be Chinese, both as a person and as a writer, versus what it means in the U.S.

Then we segue into attending a rally for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and the Chinese exec has a chance encounter with the candidate that may or may not have changed the course of history, depending on how you look at it. We then fast-forward into the future, where China is the dominant world power, and the story of the exec meeting the candidate has been memorialized in a musical, sort of a reverse "The King & I," and the portrayal is outstanding. The reverse view of how another culture might look at stepping into a poorly-understood American culture of the past is both hilarious and unsettling. Indeed, Hwang subverts us and keeps doing so throughout.

Later we get Chinese academics discussing the story on a TV talk program, which is likewise both funny and disturbing, if a little long-winded.

There's more, but I don't want to give you everything. Suffice it to say the show is both clever and provocative, entirely unlike anything you'll see on stage these days, especially in a musical. I found the whole show pretty riveting, and kind of wished I'd had more chance to mull it over before the next steamroller ran through.

The Production

The show had a rather short stay at the Curran after its premiere in Los Angeles. I imagine it's heading to Broadway eventually, given the star power of the creative team and the degree of polish applied to this production. Tony Award winners Hwang and Tesori team with director Leigh Silverman, herself a Tony nominee and frequent collaborator with Hwang, to make the complex story and staging work extremely effectively.

Probably the key to the performances is Conrad Ricamora as Xing. Whether speaking or singing, he manages to make himself the center of attention, which is quite a feat given all the other stuff going on. Hillary Clinton (Alyse Alan Louis) is also a fun role, not trying to imitate the actual candidate, but capturing enough of her to make the role both credible and funny. Perhaps the most fun aspect is that the vast majority of the cast is Asian or Asian American, so when we see the Chinese staging of the imagined Old West of the early 21st century, it's Asian faces playing redneck Americans to brilliant effect. The characterizations of "Bobby Bob" and "Randy Ray" and (of course) "Tony Manero" are really fun. A song about the American love of guns is almost too accurate to be funny, but it is both.

I wish I'd been able to see the show twice, because I know there were a lot of nuances I missed, though I caught a lot of the amusing bits.

Bottom Line

I suspect there will be some tweaking going on before this show hits Broadway (assuming that's where it's headed), but what's there already is really solid. The show is clever and creative, but entirely approachable and understandable. It manages to be both fun and interesting while all the while subverting your expectations both theatrically and culturally.

In short, this is one of the most creative and culturally important shows I've seen in a long time, perhaps since Hamilton.

If this taste is indeed just to whet our palates for a later production, I will definitely be ready and waiting for another helping.