It’s a Tuesday night, and I’m watching fellow Asian folks mock American democracy.
A judge wears a colonial wig and an American flag, wielding a bedazzled gavel. They lead an Asian chorus, explaining (with a relentlessly chipper demeanor) how Republicans and Democrats choose presidential candidates. The chorus places papers into a ballot box stylized as a witch’s cauldron. For a second, the whole world is jazz hands, wide smiles, and knowing winks.
I’m watching the song “Election Night” from the musical Soft Power, now at Arlington, Virginia’s Signature Theatre. The show (by playwright David Henry Hwang and composer Jeanine Tesori) is a critique of the Golden Age musical, primarily set in a stereotypical, song-and-dance version of 2016. The audience is eating up the satirical dish the actors are serving. A chorus-line finish elicits applause.
Andrew Cristi (Chief Justice, center) and the cast of ‘Soft Power’ at Signature Theatre. Photo by Daniel Rader.
Yet the actors quickly weaponize our enthusiasm into something stranger. The song turns to a minor key, with actor Andrew Cristi delivering a rapid-fire diatribe on the electoral college. It’s revealed the ballot box has chosen “the guy who hates China!” In the Signature Theatre production, ominous lights fill the stage as the chorus vandalizes the set with “MAGA” graffiti, the actors donning red caps and gas masks. The staging recalled Charlottesville and January 6—my racing heartbeat told me I was in physical danger. Sure enough, an Asian American character soon dies onstage.
Over the course of just a few minutes, the audience was jerked from extravaganza to elegy. It was a theatrical sucker punch, and it left me winded.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. When I see a musical with a primarily Asian cast, the theater canon has taught me to expect violence.
Many musical fans enjoy the Asian-focused love stories of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, including South Pacific (1949), Flower Drum Song (1958), and The King and I (1959). Yet these romantic shows also contain intense histories of colonization, war, slavery, and yellowface casting. The threat of sexual violence continues in more contemporary work: Western soldiers assault young Japanese women in Pacific Overtures (1976), and pimps commodify Vietnamese sex workers in Miss Saigon (1989). Despite these shows’ ravishing aesthetics, they fuse violence and beauty together for Asian Americans.
Where The King and I and Miss Saigon unintentionally reveal their creators’ anti-Asian racism, Soft Power is doing something different. It’s boldly, intentionally confronting anti-Asian racism. Watching “Election Night,” I’m reminded of the subversions of Cabaret (1966), a musical set in Berlin during the rise of Nazism. Cabaret initially seduces its audience with slinky songs and queer glamor. Then, it stuns the audience with twists that recontextualize the performance: A playful song about a gorilla turns antisemitic; a lovely ballad is revealed to be a white nationalism anthem; a show celebrating “divine decadence” ends with concentration camp imagery.
Over the last year, I’ve seen three productions of Cabaret-style shows in Asian American musical theater. Arena Stage’s Cambodian Rock Band, Broadway’s Here Lies Love, and Signature Theatre’s Soft Power all build intoxicating musical spectacles. But for these shows’ Asian protagonists, the stage they’re dancing on becomes a graveyard, an escapist fantasy, and fascism incarnate. These playwrights are tackling Asian history: Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, the Philippines’ Marcos dictatorship, America’s anti-Asian hate crimes. And all use music to lull audiences into a daze, before hitting them hard with a sucker punch of devastation.
As a Filipino American, I anticipate the shows’ violent turns, and their shock value has dissipated. I’m increasingly wary that in Asian American theater, we’ve simply replaced one kind of violent musical spectacle with another. Perhaps there’s not much distance between the violent Golden Age musical and the shocking musical processing violence. In both, horror and music keep playing on.
Cambodian Rock Band
Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band opens with a band playing, well, Cambodian rock. The songs are by the group Dengue Fever, and the script notes that the music is “raucous, loud, bubblegum, dissonant psychedelic surfer rock” and should feel like “the biggest, most epic, and possibly last concert of your life.” At Arena Stage in August of 2023, I could see audience members nodding their heads along and swaying to the beat. An emcee-like character, played by Francis Jue, soon lept onstage and introduced the band as the Cyclos.
We’re then transported to Phnom Penh in 2008. The middle-aged Chum is a Cambodian American immigrant traveling back to his homeland. He’s there to convince his daughter, Neary, to abandon her goal of prosecuting Kang Kek lev (also known as Comrade Duch) for his war crimes under the Khmer Rouge, specifically the murder of thousands in the interrogation center S-21.
The first few scenes play out like a child-of-immigrant comedy between Neary and Chum. But three revelations soon drop with a thundering weight. Chum admits he is a survivor of S-21. Francis Jue, using his charm to hold the audience in the palm of his hand, reveals he’s playing Comrade Duch. And in flashbacks, we learn that a young Chum convinced his family to delay their escape from Cambodia so he could record music with the Cyclos, unintentionally trapping them all.
Joe Ngo, Abraham Kim, Brooke Ishibashi, Jane Lui, and Tim Liu in ‘Cambodian Rock Band’ at Arena Stage. Photo by Margot Schulman.
Yee’s show isn’t a traditional musical, but the rock ’n’ roll songs—according to marketing materials, reviews, and Yee herself—are the reason to stage the show. The fun music in Cambodian Rock Band slyly obscures its brutal structure. Most of the second act takes place within S-21, stripped of music and lighting and replaced with an oppressive gray box. Duch, the play’s tormentor and host, lays this bare in a monologue to the audience: “All you have to do is lower the lights / and play some music / and you’d be shocked what you can get away with.”
Magical realism keeps the play from being a slog. When Chum and his bandmates realize the American government has abandoned them, they drown out Khmer Rouge gunfire with a jam session. For a moment, we all enjoy a doomed oasis. Later, as Duch is torturing Chum in S-21, he mysteriously conjures an electric guitar. Apparently even maniacal oppressors enjoy hearing Bob Dylan lyrics. Music, Yee is arguing, can be a reason to live during unbearable oppression.
I attended Cambodian Rock Band on an Asian-identifying audience night, and we had fun watching wildly talented Asian American performers rock out. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that despite the show celebrating Cambodian culture, it was still holding that Asian audience hostage in ways that some of us (or our parents) had already lived through.
The play’s most interesting line comes from Chum, while he’s explaining why he won’t testify against Duch: “You mean go in front of the camera like Bou Meng, be a-crying like that, go to the S-21 museum, sell my sob story to tourists at ten bucks a pop? That’s not your dad, that’s not me.” In a metatheatrical move, Yee is drawing attention to the pressure for survivors of the Khmer Rouge to perform and profit off their pain. But she’s also condemning herself: Yee is profiting off the Khmer Rouge story, too.
Despite the abundant joy of Cambodian Rock Band, the interrogation of what makes Asian stories palatable and profitable lingers with me. If Asian Americans didn’t turn our pain into entertainment, maybe our stories wouldn’t be shared at all. Maybe no one would show up if Arena Stage produced a nonmusical play about the Khmer Rouge. Maybe we need to sing and dance to matter.
Here Lies Love
A week after seeing Cambodian Rock Band, I visited my sister in New York City. Together, we went to a Broadway theater transformed into a discotheque.
A burst of blue light invited us to a dance floor. At its center was a giant disco ball, reflecting the panoramic video screens circling us. Seated audience members watched us on three sides of the theater, and I became hyper aware of my body. As people flooded the stage, as electronic music pulsed, as lights flickered above me, my identity slipped away. I wasn’t myself. I was just another shape in the crowd. This is the dangerous mandate of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s musical Here Lies Love: lose yourself in spectacle, even as you feel discomfort.
The musical’s protagonist is Imelda Marcos, the notorious First Lady of the Philippines. With her husband Ferdinand, she radically reshaped the government from 1965–1986 to her benefit, by courting celebrities, curating art, and stealing billions from the Filipino people. Meanwhile, her husband placed the country under martial law with extensive human rights violations, including the imprisonment and assassination of political opposition leader Ninoy Aquino. The People Power Revolution ended the dictatorship in 1986. Yet the Marcos’ political presence remains: Imelda Marcos later became a senator in the 2010s, and her son is the country’s current president.
Arielle Jacobs (Imelda Marcos) and Jose Llana (Ferdinand Marcos) in ‘Here Lies Love’ at the Broadway Theatre in New York City. Photo by Billy Bustamante, Matthew Murphy, and Evan Zimmerman (2023).
If you went into Here Lies Love with little knowledge of the Marcos family, you’re introduced to Imelda as a blank-slate musical ingenue. In her opening number, she confesses her dream of rising above her lower-class status. “No clothes, no bed, no jewelry,” she sings about her childhood, while twirling in a pink dress. “Sometimes I had no shoes.” When she said that line, the Filipinos around me laughed. We all knew of Imelda’s infamous shoe collection, the most well-known stories about her. But no one around us seemed to get the joke—they knew nothing about the Filipino history at hand; they knew nothing about us.
The musical at first functions like a rom-com, with Imelda and Ferdinand having a whirlwind marriage that spirals out of control. Aquino, a potential third point of a love triangle, soon becomes their political enemy. Director Alex Timbers shifts the audience into various characters throughout the musical: we embody dancers, admiring crowds, protestors, and funeral mourners.
Byrne and Slim write their most exciting songs when staging Imelda Marcos as a camp diva. In her graphic memoir, Filipina cartoonist Lorina Mapa writes, “Yet for all their dizzying wealth, the Marcoses were incredibly tacky. There was a pathetic neediness in the nouveau-riche ways they tried to impress their high society counterparts around the world.” Byrne and Slim smartly deploy this tackiness, recreating the gaudy pageantry of Asians dressing up in wealthy American drag. “Beautiful women in beautiful homes,” Imelda sings in wonder while visiting Studio 54, before belting, “Just out of reach if your skin’s colored brown!”
The glaring problem with Here Lies Love is that Filipino audiences are waiting for the other shoe to drop. When the horrors of the Marcos dictatorship are finally revealed, it’s not particularly moving, since we’ve already braced for impact. A DJ interrupts the show occasionally to state the American government’s interventions in the Philippines. During the song “Order 1081,” about the declaration of martial law, video screens flash the words “70,000 incarcerated, 35,000 tortured, 3,200 killed.” But these feel like hastily added footnotes to a finished work, not a part of the dramatic narrative.
My family’s history is entwined with the Marcos dictatorship. My lolo and lola moved to Canada in the 1960s for medical school, before moving to Connecticut and then Virginia for their practices. When martial law was declared in 1972, their families pleaded them to stay in America, even though my grandparents never planned to permanently live there. When I saw Here Lies Love, I saw the politics that forged my existence becoming mythology.
Watching the show, I grew self-conscious of how non-Filipinos were learning about this history. Many Americans watch Cabaret, but they learn about the Holocaust in many ways besides one musical. Many Americans watching Here Lies Love might only ever learn about the Marcos dictatorship through this show. Take it from me. I barely knew anything about the Khmer Rouge before watching Cambodian Rock Band.
Here Lies Love is not the story of my family; it’s not the story of ordinary Filipinos. The People Power Revolution only gets the final song before bows. In a direct address to the audience before the song, actor Moses Villarama says with hope in his voice: “Here in America and over the world, democracies are under threat. Democracies are only as strong as the people.” But when I think about my family being stranded in America, I’m not hopeful, I’m angry. This musical about delusional antiheroes has very few moments to channel that anger.
Soft Power
Of the three sucker-punch spectacles I’ve seen in the past year, Soft Power is the most compelling musical. It’s the zenith of this particular form of Asian American theater, but also exposes the form’s breaking point.
The show opens with a conversation between Xūe Xíng, a Chinese theater producer, and DHH, an author surrogate for playwright David Henry Hwang. It’s directly after the 2016 election in America, and DHH is outraged. Xūe is simply trying to get DHH to write a musical for Chinese audiences. DHH is soon attacked on the street (a hate crime Hwang himself experienced in 2016). On death’s door, he enters a fever dream: an inverted version of The King and I. That musical was about an English woman traveling East, educating an exoticized Asia and king about Western values. Soft Power flips the script: we watch Xūe traveling West, educating an exoticized America and Hillary Clinton about Eastern values.
Soft Power is a razor-sharp satire of American exceptionalism. The all-Asian cast distorts white America “through the looking glass,” the way China has been distorted through Orientalism. Hwang describes this America in the script as “a deeply militarized, religious fundamentalist, violent society.” He’s not wrong.
The source of drama in Hwang and Tesori’s musical is still shocking the audience with violence after a musical spectacle. For example, Xūe sings a triumphant song asking the Trump administration to be like China, but his singing sneakily becomes undemocratic: “We’ll share new surveillance tools / To give you eyes / Silence those who criticize / As together we rise.”
Steven Eng (DHH) and the cast of ‘Soft Power’ at Signature Theatre. Photo by Daniel Rader.
The most heartbreaking sucker punch is when the musical restages DHH’s stabbing, giving DHH a dramatic moment of clarity. “I thought if I acted white enough this country would accept me,” DHH says. He speaks to a fact too many Asian Americans try to bury: no matter how hard we try, assimilation is impossible.
Soft Power achieves greater pathos than Cambodian Rock Band and Here Lies Love because of its different framing. Violence occurs onstage at the very beginning of the musical, not the end. So when more violence erupts, we’re reminded that it’s always been there, fueling our shared theatrical hallucination. Hwang also goes out of his way to emphasize that despite his characters’ fame, they’re still ordinary people. Being a Pulitzer-winning playwright doesn’t exempt you from being a racial target.
However, the strict format of the musical curbs Hwang’s dramaturgical brilliance. Traditional musicals need an 11 o’clock number, and Tesori and Hwang provide “Democracy,” sung to the rafters by Grace Yoo’s Hillary Clinton. Like the ending of Here Lies Love, it unironically promotes democracy. Yet it’s strange that for a show overflowing with ideas, Hwang only imagines voting as the way forward in politics, not revolution or even reform. Also unfortunate is the show’s white–Asian binary. We know Donald Trump’s xenophobia extends to people of Muslim, Mexican, and African backgrounds. But including the full diversity of America would stop Hwang from satirizing the “two cultures clashing” narrative of classic musicals.
I took my Filipina mother to see Soft Power with me, and she was moved to tears by a scene late in the show. She was reminded of a 2021 hate crime against a Filipina woman in New York City, where security guards and regular people failed to intervene. Simply existing in public is dangerous for Filipinas, and this musical pierced her with this truth.
Perhaps that’s why I’m so nervous about the endings of all three sucker-punch musicals I’ve seen this past year. All of them reiterate that totalitarian movements can fall, and leave the audience walking out of the theater energized. But Soft Power made me wonder if there’s a pressure for Asian Americans to always transform our trauma into hope. After witnessing so much violence onstage, I didn’t feel energized, I wanted to cry. The incessant cheeriness of these shows’ curtain calls sometimes feels like a threat. Be happy, no matter what you just experienced.
Reviewing Cabaret, critic Nancy Franklin once wrote that the Emcee was a “spectacle of mixed messages.” The artists behind the new wave of Asian American musical theater aim for similar spectacles. Here Lies Loves’ Conrad Ricamora stated he brings “cognitive dissonance” to the show, echoing Yee’s call for “dissonant” music. David Henry Hwang said he sought to explore the “contradiction” of classic musicals in Soft Power.
I’d much rather see a “spectacle of mixed messages” over the overt racism of previous Asian musicals. I want strange, challenging, morally complex characters in Asian American theater, and these shows deliver. Perhaps I should direct my anger less at these musicals, and more at the violence of Asian American life. In the essay collection Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong states, “I could begin writing about buying flowers from the corner deli, but give me enough pages—two, twenty, or one hundred—and no matter what, violence will saturate my imagination.” Writing a violent musical about Asian Americans is just writing a truthful musical.
Other groups in America have violent histories, but their contemporary musicals stage violence differently. My favorite musicals with Black protagonists are Caroline, or Change, Passing Strange, and A Strange Loop. All follow ordinary Americans who struggle with performing Blackness. What distinguishes these shows from current Asian American musicals is that they’re brutally honest, from the first scene, about the violence they’re staging. These musicals are not sucker punches. They look you in the eye and deliver their emotional blows.
Maybe Asian American theater could also follow the lead of In the Heights. That musical engages with the traditional book musical format that Soft Power does, with a similar threat of societal violence hovering above its characters of color. But librettist Quiara Alegría Hudes understands that she doesn’t need to stage violence literally in order for audiences to feel it viscerally.
Right now, there’s no In the Heights for the Asian American community. There’s no popular musical about Asians living and dreaming and aching, in a story framed by violence but not defined by it. Asian musicals somewhat similar to In the Heights barely survive on Broadway: Allegiance (2015) lasted a few months, and KPOP (2023) only lasted a few weeks. Musical plays that do fit this mold, like Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone and Poor Yella Rednecks, haven’t made it to Broadway yet.
Things could change. This upcoming Broadway season, the musical Maybe Happy Ending seems to provide an opportunity for Asian American actors to express their full selves. But the show still operates under a science fiction framework that (hopefully) subverts the Orientalist trope of the Asian cyborg. In nearly all musical theater, violence still haunts Asian America.
When my mother and my tita were young, they acted in a Port City Playhouse production of The King and I. It was 1980, and they were part of a handful of Asian people in the cast (the leads were white). My tita played Princess Ying Yaowalak, adopting a broken English accent she didn’t have. My mother leapt across the stage, moving her limbs in faintly yoga-like poses. During most numbers, they bowed reverently.
In retrospect, this production was cringey and racist. But when talking about the production with my mother and tita, they burst into laughter. They loved being in a huge, spectacular show, which was so different from their lives at home. I asked my mom if there was a camp element to the whole thing— acting in a production that could’ve been humiliating somehow wound up being hysterical. “Camp?” my mother said loudly. “That was real theater!”
When I’m feeling most generous about Cambodian Rock Band, Here Lies Love, and Soft Power, I hope to adopt my mom’s laughter and fondness for musical theater. We’re talking about stories where people burst out into song; it’s not that serious. Asian Americans are allowed to laugh at the absurdity of violence we are forced to live with, and these new musicals create a space for this.
My hope is that one day, the next generation of Asian American kids will look back on Cambodian Rock Band, Here Lies Love, and Soft Power with the same fascination but disdain that I feel for The King and I. Yes, these kids will appreciate these musical spectacles, but their stagings of violence might not feel necessary anymore. Perhaps the world will have grown beyond these ridiculously violent stories, because Asian Americans will have less ridiculously violent lives.
Soft Power plays through September 15, 2024, in the MAX Theatre at Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell Avenue, Arlington, VA. For tickets ($40–$128) call (703) 820-9771 or purchase online. Information about ticket discounts is available here.
Running Time: 90 minutes, without an intermission.
The program for Soft Power is online here.
Closed captions are available via the GalaPro app.
SEE ALSO:
A spectacular staging of a political fantasia in ‘Soft Power’ at Signature (review by D.R. Lewis, August 15, 2024)
About the Wendi Winters Memorial Series: DC Theater Arts has partnered with the Wendi Winters Memorial Foundation to honor the life and work of Wendi Winters, the DC Theater Arts writer who died in the Capital Gazette shooting in Annapolis, Maryland, on June 28, 2018. To honor Wendi’s legacy, the Wendi Winters Memorial Foundation has funded the Wendi Winters Memorial Series, monthly articles to be produced by DC Theater Arts to bring attention to theater companies and theater practitioners in our region who engage in exemplary work that makes our community a better place. The centerpiece of these articles is a series we are calling “The Companies We Keep,” articles offering an in-depth look at one local theater company each month. In these times of division and conflict, DC Theater Arts chooses to celebrate those who do good.
For more information on DC Theater Arts’ Wendi Winters Memorial Series, check out this article graciously published by our friends at District Fray Magazine.
