Blogcritics

Theater Review: Fahrenheit 451 (South Pasadena, CA)

Purple Tigress — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:35:23 EDT

Ray Bradbury's own scripting and his theater company's production shows promise, but the master of sci-fi short stories isn't the master of the stage yet.
A lot has happened in the world since Ray Bradbury wrote his 1953 Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury has adapted his novel for the stage and it is the current guest production by Bradbury's Pandemonium Theatre Company at the Fremont Centre Theatre in South Pasadena. Bradbury's play starts slow, with some weak transitions, and yet there are some promisingly...

Theater Review: Don Juan (LA)

Purple Tigress — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:41:50 EDT

Don Juan gets his due at Glendale's A Noise Within. This is a sexy, lustful, and wildly funny revival of Moliere's morality play.
Lord Byron portrayed Don Juan as a victim of Catholicism's sexual repression and of women's desires, but in Moliere's version, Dom Juan ou le Festin de Pierre, Don Juan is an atheist condemned to hell. The current production of Don Juan at Glendale, California's classical repertory theater, A Noise Within, maintains the integrity of Moliere's...

Los Angeles Japan Film Festival 2008 - Atagoal's Cat Magical Forest

Purple Tigress — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 13:47:18 EDT

Can a fat cat save the world from serene conformity?
This 2006 computer animated movie, Atagoal wa Neko no Mori directed by Mizuho Nishikubo, is about a boisterous cat whose morality is suspect, but whose passion for life saves the day. Based on a popular manga by Hiroshi Masumura, this screenplay by Hirotoshi Kobayashi condemns mindless conformity for the sake of peaceful existence. The title...

Los Angeles Japan Film Festival 2008 - Hula Girls

Purple Tigress — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 11:51:34 EDT

Can young girls and a tropical dance save a small mining town?
What do you do when your small, poverty-stricken town where the major industry is coal mining, is headed for financial disaster as the coal mines slowly close down?In the late 1950s and early 1960s, one town had the answer. They opened the Joban Hawaiian Center in January 1961. It was the first resort facility and theme park to open in Japan and...

Los Angeles Japan Film Festival 2008 - Tokyo Cowboys

Purple Tigress — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 11:28:52 EDT

Is it really still a white man's world, even in Japan? Saft's documentary is another "white man making his fortune in the Orient" tale.
There's a moment in the rough cut version of Tokyo Cowboys, supposedly a documentary of foreign men in Tokyo, that startled me, causing all my built-up understanding of the situation to come crashing down from the foundations carefully built up by director Daneeta Loretta Saft. Saft comes on the screen and we learn she was married to the guy,...

Theater Review: My Fair Lady (LA)

Purple Tigress — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:55:46 EDT

This gorgeous production provides a wonderful evening of tunes, costumes, and comedy. It's too loverly to miss.
If you haven't seen this sublime Cameron Mackintosh and the National Theatre of Great Britain production of My Fair Lady yet at the Ahmanson, call for tickets now. The run ends on April 27, although you'll have a second chance when it opens for a limited run at the Orange County Performing Arts Center from June 4 to 15. Director Trevor Nunn's...

Los Angeles Japan Film Festival 2008 - Classics and Comics

Purple Tigress — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 17:25:09 EDT

The Japan Film Festival in Los Angeles turns five years old and suffers from some growing pains.
The Japan Film Festival is historically five years old and suffers from some growing pains. Originally called the Chanoma Film Festival, it focused on films that focused on everyday life. Chanoma literally means living room. After all, samurai and geisha movies come over to the US. More recently, anime has become popular here. Films about everyday...

Beyond Sweeney Todd: Sondheim on Video

Purple Tigress — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 15:33:40 EST

Before Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, Stephen Sondheim's other musicals have been made into movies or had stage productions recorded.
Before Tim Burton and Johnny Depp took on Stephen Sondheim, most of the original Broadway cast of Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, was filmed during their 1982 national tour. George Hearn replaced Len Carious, but Angela Lansbury is there in her Tony-winning turn as Mrs. Lovett. If I recall correctly from the PBS broadcast,...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Theater Review: Things That Need to Be Said - David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face

Purple Tigress — Sat, 2 Jun 2007 21:39:42 EDT

It does seem to be more than a wee bit narcissistic to do a play about yourself and then, even worse, to give the protagonist your own name. It's not unlike a one-person show, written and directed by the star, most of which can easily be summed up as one PR person once cattily confided as: "Me. Me. ME. Me."It would be easy to dismiss David Henry Hwang's new play, Yellow Face, now playing at the Mark Taper in its world premiere, as nothing more than Me-ism. Yet there are some things that need to be said in 2007 about the problems of yellow face and the general representation of Asians and Asian Americans in the theater as well as the cinema and who better to say it than the first and only Asian American to win a Tony award for best play?Hwang's Tony was for M. Butterfly, a play that I admit I have some affection for due to my own socio-cultural beliefs and because, in a way, it launched my rocky career as a theater critic. The arts writer at the small newspaper where I got my start was queasy about the gender-bending play and I volunteered and even paid for my own ticket.The 1988 Tony award win for M. Butterfly seemed to signal a new era for Asians and Asian Americans: an end to Madame Butterflies, to men like Mickey Rooney, Marlon Brando, John Wayne, Katherine Hepburn, Warner Oland or David Carradine dressed up in yellow face. Black face was dead except for what was perhaps an ill-considered move by Ted Danson at Whoopi Goldberg's roast. Finally, we could bury yellow face as well. Yet in September of 1989, Miss Saigon opened in London, reviving the Madame Butterfly story now transplanted to Vietnam and had a Welsh actor, Jonathan Pryce, playing the part of a Eurasian, originally with yellow face eye prosthetics. When the production came to Broadway in 1991, Pryce was allowed to reprise his role, something that Asian American actors and other theater people, including David Henry Hwang protested. Pryce went on to win a Tony although Miss Saigon did not win for best musical in London (Return to the Forbidden Planet) or New York City (The Will Rogers Follies).This all was a slap in the face for Asian Americans and David Henry Hwang. Although much has changed since Hwang's father was refused a home purchase in the tony San Marino neighborhood of the San Gabriel Valley, much has not. While Frank Chin, Hwang's literary father and fierce critic, might have written a bitter diatribe, Hwang revisits this episode with a sense of humor, making himself the fall guy.The character Hwang (played by Hoon Lee with a clean-shaven face and a nearly clean-shaven head — a far cry from Hwang's unruly thick locks, moustache, and beard) has cast a white actor with dark hair and eyes (an earnest Peter Scanavino as Marcus) who the character Hwang believes is part Asian to play the part of a Eurasian and then, discovering his mistake, must cover it up. The actor, Marcus, finds some comfort in his adopted community and continues to pass for almost a decade until the truth finally is revealed.In the last decade, the playwright Hwang has been contemplating what makes identity. Is a Chinese American more Chinese or more American? Is a white person raised in China Chinese? What gives us our ethnic identity in today's world? And moreover, why does yellow perilism in its many forms continue? When will Americans of East Asian descent be really American? With communism dead in Russia and most of the former iron curtain nations, only Cuba, North Korea and mainland China remain as a threat to democracy. Will mainland China and not North Korea take the place that Russia has vacated?Was it yellow perilism that caused Wen Ho Lee to be investigated as a possible spy for mainland China even though he was Taiwanese and a naturalized US citizen? How about the 1996 US campaign financial controversy where the Democratic Party was accused of receiving funds funneled in from the PROC? The story broke in the Los Angeles Times on Sept. 21, 1996 and was picked up by the Washington Post. Was the scandal nothing more than yellow journalism bringing back yellow perilism since nothing was proven?It was not so long ago that the Chinese community was scrutinized based on their connections with mainland China and communism during America's anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s. Despite generations born and raised here, there is also a long history of Americans of Chinese descent and other visibly Asian ethnics of being considered not quite American while white immigrants may only have a generation to pass before acceptance. Yes, there are Asian Americans in San Marino now, but there remains a disturbing view of Asian Americans as the eternal other, that does not require the same kind of respect now afforded to non-Arab ethnics of African descent.There still is an audience for East Asian women dying for white men in Europe, America and Australia, places where Miss Saigon seems popular, more popular than M. Butterfly. It is still okay for white men to portray Eurasians and even Asians (witness David Carradine reprising his Kung Fu role on current day TV commercials) and yet one would guess that white people as black doesn't go down too well (although there is the case of Angelina Jolie playing Mariane Pearl, who is of Afro-Cuban and Dutch descent).With the popularity of Memoirs of a Geisha and a disturbing movie realization of that novel (could you imagine a black heroine being the one who doesn't fight and flee?), these are questions that need to be asked. Why is the Western world still fascinated with the helpless Asian woman? Why, in 2007, can we expect more yellow face with Brian Dennehy as Genghis Khan in an NBC movie? Can the directors and producers still claim there was no Asian actor with enough skill to play the part?Yellow Face is not, as Wikipedia suggests, a rehash of Face Value. It is also not perfect and could use some judicious editing. However, David Henry Hwang's new play brings us back to the essential questions of the Miss Saigon protests in a way that is both humorous and hopefully insures that they will not be forgotten, but re-considered.

Former theater critic for the LA Weekly and Los Angeles Times and currently an editing slave at a dot-com.

The Face of Truth: David Henry Hwang on His New Play, Yellow Face

Purple Tigress — Wed, 30 May 2007 18:40:21 EDT

You've heard of whiteface, redface, and blackface, but you might not have heard of yellowface. David Henry Hwang's new play, Yellow Face, will change all that.While whiteface and redface refer to animal species — or, in the case of red-faced, a visage flushed with embarrassment — blackface refers to actors painting their faces black and portraying stereotyped characters from minstrel shows. Likewise, yellowface refers to actors, usually of European descent, made up to be East Asian. Yellow Face, which is a co-production of Center Theatre Group and the Public Theater of New York in association with East West Players, will open in New York this autumn and already opened for previews on May 10 at the Mark Taper Forum.In 1991, Hwang was one of the Asian-American voices raised against the casting of Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce as the half-Asian engineer in the Madame Butterfly–inspired musical Miss Saigon. Asian-American actors asked, “Why not us?”In decades past, Asian characters had been portrayed by white actors, notably Marlon Brando in the 1956 film The Teahouse of the August Moon and Peter Sellers in 1980's The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu — but hadn't the time rightfully arrived for Asian characters to be portrayed by Asians?At the time, Hwang had become the most prominent Asian-American playwright, having won a Tony Award for Best Play for 1988's M. Butterfly, which re-examined Giacomo Puccini's opera with a critical eye. This was before M. Butterfly became a 1993 David Cronenberg movie that was, says Hwang, more about how “all romantic love is self-delusion” than his intended theme of “self-delusion in the context of cultural differences.”For those unfamiliar with M. Butterfly, Hwang based the play on a titillating tidbit that seemed too outlandish to be true: A French diplomat had carried on a decade-long affair with a Chinese opera star without realizing that the actor was a female impersonator (originally, the Peking Opera had only male actors). By subverting the tale of the East Asian woman used as a pleasant diversion and then left behind, Hwang's play raised issues of Western paternalism and fantasy similar to those raised in the late author Edward Said's work on Orientalism.In contrast, Miss Saigon seemed not only to raise and praise the submissive East Asian woman myth, but also, by casting a white actor as a half-Asian character, seemed an affront to the slow progress that Asian-Americans actors were making on stage and screen. Despite the protest and the opposition of the first Asian-American playwright to win a Tony, Pryce went on to play the part — and won a Tony for it.Even though Hwang had written his first off-Broadway play, F.O.B., in his early 20s, he never expected M. Butterfly to become a Broadway hit. In fact, he says, the actors had a betting pool on when the production would fold.He followed that success with Golden Child, which — after its 1996 world premiere at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa — also went to Broadway and was nominated for a Tony. Since then, Hwang has been busy. He co-wrote (with Linda Woolverton and Robert Falls) the book for the Disney-produced Elton John–Tim Rice musical Aida, worked on Disney's Tarzan and wrote some screenplays. Working on such non-Asian-related works was strangely relaxing since he didn't have the additional level of responsibility of representing Asians and Asian Americans. It was also a measure of his success — proof that he wasn't boxed into an ethnic niche.A decade passed before Hwang finally decided to write an original play.He took three months to write Yellow Face in 2005, and then workshopped it. He has continued rewriting it during rehearsals at the Mark Taper Forum — the venue where he premiered his adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song. (That went on to garner Hwang a third Tony nomination.)It's not surprising that he decided to write about the Miss Saigon controversy. Hwang compares his plays to a photo album and feels “privileged to have snapshots of himself” to read and help him remember where he was at that time.A lot has changed since Hwang grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. He can remember a time when his parents were unable to buy a house in San Marino, a time before the demographics changed in favor of Asian Americans in many local cities, a time before the Wen Ho Lee case and the naming of East West Players' theater in his honor.In a recent telephone interview with the Pasadena Weekly, the Los Angeles–based Hwang described Yellow Face, saying, “This is a mockumentary. DHH is the main character, and this play has things that actually happened and things that are invented.“[DHH] inadvertently, after leading a protest against Jonathan Pryce, a white actor as an Asian lead, casts a white actor as an Asian lead in the play, Face Value.”The comedy comes in as he attempts to cover up his mistake.For those who don't know, Face Value is one of Hwang's notable failures, a play starring Law & Order: SVU's B.D. Wong that went to Broadway in 1993 and closed after previews. Informed that Wikipedia describes Yellow Face as a rewrite of that failed effort, Hwang says, “I don't know if I'd call it a rewrite. That's when you're reworking or you're going back to that play to fix it.”Hwang hopes that there's been some evolution of his ideas since the early 1990s, but this new play does take on some of the original issues he addressed in Face Value, namely those of cultural identity and “the complexity of authenticity as a concept.”Authenticity? That's a familiar issue. “Authenticity is an ambiguous term,” he adds, after being asked about writer and activist Frank Chin. Chin, who lives in Los Angeles, has labeled Hwang and other Asian-American writers as “inauthentic.” Hwang quotes Chin in Yellow Face as labeling DHH “a white racist asshole.”Yet, Hwang states, "I really like him as a writer. I kind of consider him to be my literary father, which then makes me a disowned son. When F.O.B. was first done in New York, I was 23 and I looked on Frank as a pioneer."Hearing Chin's criticism, Hwang acknowledges, “It hurt my feelings.” But that was more than 20 years ago. While Hwang has “kind of gone back and forth” on his feelings about Chin's criticism, he's glad that now there are a lot more Asian-American playwrights who can represent different points of view. Obviously Yellow Face, with a protagonist named DHH, represents Hwang's own viewpoint.

Former theater critic for the LA Weekly and Los Angeles Times and currently an editing slave at a dot-com.