Theater Review (NYC): Victor Woo: The Average Asian American at the Fringe Festival

Musicals scored by singer-songwriters are hot these days, at least in theory, but the success of Duncan Sheik's Spring Awakening hasn't guaranteed anything for similar efforts. Patty Griffin's 10 Million Miles, for example, didn't get great reviews and ran off-Broadway for only a month. As with Mamma Mia and the many pop-nostalgia musicals that followed it, one brilliantly successful case does not guarantee a payday for others of the same ilk.

A musical has to work as a piece of theater, of course; good music isn't enough (that's why they invented concerts). Audiences, and to a lesser extent critics, have to like the whole show, not just one aspect. Spring Awakening is a great show because it's a good story staged wonderfully well and told with exciting music that fits. Sheik uses the vocabulary of pop music, but the show is a modern-style musical, with songs that exist entirely to serve the story. Hummability isn't even a secondary goal.

It's hard to make theater out of today's pop, because most current songwriting is confessional rather than character-based. Songwriters like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and, to a degree, Patty Griffin, write songs from the points of view of different characters with interesting narratives. But such songwriters are rare.

Kevin So is a singer-songwriter who, like the above mentioned artists, doesn't just express feelings but also tells tales and sketches characters. Until now that had been captured most explicitly in his 2003 two-CD concept album, Leaving the Lights On, which tells the R&B-inflected story of a Chinese-American boy who doesn't want to go to college and become an engineer or a doctor, but instead dreams of becoming a rock star. So's unusual ability to frame vivid characters and settings in catchy, sophisticated pop tunes makes his songs ideal for the stage, and a fine musical has now been crafted from them.

(Full disclosure: I was previously familiar with many of the songs in the show, having, in the past, played in Kevin So's band.)

Victor Woo: The Average Asian American is receiving an ambitious, joyful, and even somewhat star-studded maiden voyage by the Present Company as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. It successfully combines the narrative flow of a show like Spring Awakening (or an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical) with an original-music version of something like the pop-hummable Jersey Boys. The show is a little rough around the edges, but that's to be expected of any full-scale musical done on a Fringe timetable. With a little more polish it could be a smash, and not just with the downtown hipsters who populate the Fringe audience.

Article Author: Jon Sobel

Jon Sobel is Blogcritics' Culture and Theater Editor. In addition to reviewing NYC theater, he writes a semi-regular round-up of independent music releases. By day he is a computer professional and a freelance writer and editor, and at night he's a …

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