Allegiance Previews — Page 11

I, for one, can tell if a standing O is routine or spontaneous and heartfelt. I can feel it in the energy in the room. A rolling SO (like the wave) feels emotionally different than the audience instinctively rising to its feet as one.

Good article. Hard to believe Kuo is only the third?!?! Crazy.

I wish I liked ALLEGIANCE better than I did. It's an important story that needs to be told, but I found the writing to careen between polemic (OK, much of it deserved) and melodrama. The performers are fine--it's so great to see Lea Salonga back on stage, Telly Leung was in fine voice and George Takei was very likable--but the score is unmemorable, a large negative in a musical. Actually, this show needed to be either an opera, with lots of heightened emotion, or a straight play. I think I would have liked it better as the latter. I attended via an online lottery win, which put me in the mezzanine last night.

Updated On: 10/28/15 at 10:30 AM

mamaleh said: "Actually, this show needed to be either an opera, with lots of heightened emotion, or a straight play. I think I would have liked it better as the latter."

A really good point -- I hadn't thought of this.

Now I really want to see the results of those surveys!

If I remember right, the main criticism by the LA Times theater critic of the SD production was the same as many posters here - that the main subject matter, which could have been so potent and relevant, has been weakened and diffused by the melodramatic story line and unremarkable music. I guess the makers did not read that or paid no heed.

"The other possibility is that it's simply beyond the abilities of the director/writer/composer to do better (or different)."

Sadly, bingo.

There have been a few posters that were unable to access the ed it mode for quite a while.

dramamama611 said: "There have been a few posters that were unable to access the ed it mode for quite a while."

Yes, it was a great source of annoyance after the Great Forum Update, though I discovered I could edit directly through the script URL given the thread and message IDs (thanks Haterobics!), so Rob must have fixed something in the interim (thanks Rob!).

LizzieCurry said: "I'm not really surprised that in the first three paragraphs here, it sounds like the creative team can't agree on what they want the show to be. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/theater/george-takei-guides-allegiance-a-musical-not-a-starship.html?ref=theater&smid=tw-nyttheater&smtyp=cur&_r=0

"

Well, those comments from the team are very much like the ones bandied about during the marketing session in one of their "trek to Broadway" documentary videos on Facebook, i.e. a larger discussion about target audience and avoiding the "it's a downer" thing. I think the way NYT decided to frame that intro against Takei in the third paragraph is where someone might interpret implied clashing, but if Takei felt the story didn't serve to highlight the injustices and facts of the internment, surely he'd speak up, right? (That's just my take of his personality and stake in this whole thing, but who knows.)

The fact that they dwell so heavily on being worried about "downer" source material explains a lot of why the show is so unfocused and non-specidic. It's not like this material is more ostensibly upsetting than FUN HOME last season, or really many critically acclaimed dramatic musicals. It's afraid to be itself.

Good point, pootie2. I think where to look there is George himself, who is a patriotic and optimistic person despite having grown up in America that put him in a camp because of his heritage and also made it impossible to be open about his sexual identity. But he believed in his country's capacity to get better. Again, his story is more interesting in pretty much every respect than what the writers came up with.

I’ve seen both Old Globe production and the current Broadway production. I’ll post a song list from OG because it’s significantly different. I don’t remember the second scene (after Old Sam learned Kei’s passing) was about Tanabata (Star Festival – wishing tree part), it was more like Japanese American’s everyday life. BTW the set was awful in that scene. You don't put a wishing paper on a regular tree nor wooden plank. You use bamboo tree with leaves, which is easy to obtain. Overall, I like the revision better except I didn’t like Arima’s direction (I never was impressed with his direction in other productions anyway) this time either. In OG, Masaoka was portrayed as a bit more a villain and now he is not. There is an excellent article from 2012 (a letter from JACL and response from the production team) that I linked below. In it, JACL complained about Masaoka’s portrayal and the team responded that “The writers have been careful not to make specific changes based on specific requests,” but apparently they did eventually.

“Sam’s Caucasian, pacifist girlfriend at Heart Mountain aids the resisters … When Sam returns from the war, Mike Masaoka tells Sam that his girlfriend had betrayed the United States. Apparently this leads to Sam forever hating his girlfriend and also his family … Again, Masaoka had nothing to do with telling anyone to despise his girlfriend – the point is to get the audience to hate Masaoka further.”

http://www.rafu.com/2012/08/a-question-of-allegiance/

Here is what I wrote to my friend after seeing OG production:

“The cast was pretty good and I think Telly is the weakest link. For that role, we need a bit more butcher guy. George was good in Grandpa and old Sam. Michael K Lee was excellent as I expected. Telly's Sammy involves with a white girl in the camp but I didn't see any chemistry between them and I think it's too convenient to insert a forbidden love in this show. For the audience to feel sympathetic for them, they have to show a really strong love before they are torn apart but it was very superficial. Another thing I had a problem is that they couldn't convey the feeling that the camp was really miserable and terrible place to live, the audience really need to feel that your dignity was stripped away. They used projections so they could have shown a slideshow or something of the real pic from the camp. Also they focused on the in-fight of Japanese Americans in the camp which was true, but they didn't go into the injustice done by the federal government much. Yes they mentioned it but I don't know if the audience really felt it too? Also as a person who saw both Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb museums, the direction of the A-bomb related scene was nearly offensive. I read a review that praised the effect, but A-bomb was an unimaginably horrific thing and the impact in the show was really lacking, so I'd rather want them to omit it if they can't do a justice. I want to say to Arima visit the places before you try to tackle the A-bomb issue.”

Funny thing is that this time I wasn’t too offended by A-bomb scene. I still think they have too many things to tell within 2.5 hrs and the true villain, U.S. government, wasn’t really there. Instead, those three GI soldiers were the villains. I think it is a delicate situation as you don’t really want to alienate your main stream audience, but it’s hard to have an empathy when the big numbers in the show were about baseball and dance party.

Updated On: 10/30/15 at 01:43 PM

lite2shine said: "I’ve seen both Old Globe production and the current Broadway production. I’ll post a song list from OG because it’s significantly different. I don’t remember the second scene (after Old Sam learned Kei’s passing) was about Tanabata (Star Festival – wishing tree part), it was more like Japanese American’s everyday life. BTW the set was awful in that scene. You don't put a wishing paper on a regular tree nor wooden plank. You use bamboo tree with leaves, which is easy to obtain. Overall, I like the revision better except I didn’t like Arima’s direction (I never was impressed with his direction in other productions anyway) this time either. In OG, Masaoka was portrayed as a bit more a villain and now he is not. ........ I still think they have too many things to tell within 2.5 hrs and the true villain, U.S. government, wasn’t really there. Instead, those three GI soldiers were the villains. I think it is a delicate situation as you don’t really want to alienate your main stream audience, but it’s hard to have an empathy when the big numbers in the show were about baseball and dance party. "

Thanks a lot for your report and the old song list, lite2shine. Framing the wartime U.S. government post-Pearl Harbor as the direct enemy would be too risky even if true, as you say, so I'd guess the creative team intended for those guards to be symbolic stand-ins instead, whether effective or potentially offensive in a different way.