Les Mehserables

"Don't worry Anne, you're gonna win the Oscar."

If I was to characterize a theme for December, besides as "the month I spent way too much money", it would be, "the month I was let down by movies I was really excited for." The first was "The Hobbit," which I vented about here, and the other was "Les Miserables."

But before I say another word, readers, listen to me! There is something I must do! I must confess that I've never seen a musical production of "Les Miz" (I use a z because it has more glitz, Broadway glitz). My only exposure to it was through the 10th Anniversary Concert (Judy Kuhn! Lea Salonga!) and the 25th Anniversary Concert (Lea Salonga again! Norm Lewis!), both of which I enjoy for different reasons, none of them being Nick Jonas. But from reading the synopsis of the musical, I got the idea of what was happening in-between musical numbers. And truthfully, I have a theory that you can either be a "Les Miz" fan or a "Phantom of the Opera" fan. Loving too many bombastic, 80's musicals will make your head explode. And I was more of a "Phantom" girl (what can I say? I love my doomed love stories).

We're like Romeo and Juliet! Except British! I mean, French!

So being a relative "Les Miz" virgin, I was excited for the film version. This was not going to be like Joel Schumacher's "Phantom" movie where the Phantom of the opera couldn't hold a note without growling and Christine cheated the cadenza. No, this had Hugh Jackman (who I had seen on Broadway before), Anne Hathaway, Samantha Barks and Aaron Tveit, people who have proved that they could sing to the back of the house. And if the various "Les Miz" concerts have taught me anything, it's that "Les Miz" is a showcase for beautiful voices singing with every single instrument in the orchestra, while waving revolutionary banners. This would be a transcendent experience, not just with beautiful voices, but with gorgeous scenery, sweeping shots of Paris and crowds rising up and fighting while singing!

2012 in Theatre Superlatives

"What good thing have you seen lately?"

That's the question I'm usually asked when I tell people that I write about theater (for a living, wow). It's as if because I report on it, I am suddenly the guru of good theatrical tastes. And since year-end lists and summations are "a la mode" during this time in the season, I want to offer something in the stream-of-consciousness vein. I'm realizing that the more theater I see, the more they start to blend together. And what makes a play stand out in your memory, even months later, were small moments that just burrowed deep into your brain and refused to let go.

So here is the 2012 Deep (Diep) Theater Superlatives!, a list of shows that were memorable in many different ways to me. It's not a complete list of the best things I saw this year, it's even more subjective than that. These plays, at different price points, in different locales in New York City, did what the arts does best, grab a piece of your soul and leave their mark on it.

"The Hobbit" aka Dammit Peter Jackson!

Gandalf: worst party promoter ever.

I saw "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" film at midnight on opening night. I sat my butt down at the theater at Lincoln Square on the Upper West Side at 10:30 PM, excited and just a little bit sleepy. I exited the theater 4.5 hours later at 3 a.m. incredibly sleepy, drained and disappointed, like I'd been cramming for a college exam that I probably won't get an A on. And my thoughts after went something like: "Oh god I know I'm going to sit through two more of these and it's going to be so fucking long!"

Compare this to my thoughts after seeing "Fellowship of the Ring" 12 (WTF?!) years ago, which was, "Oh my god, I have no idea what I just saw but I love it and what happens next?!" Which was quickly followed by an explanation of the ending of "Return of the King," which was followed by a "WTF, Frodo fails?!" I was a very easily excitable 13 year old (like almost all 13 year olds).

I tried to figure out why it was that I, as a self-professed Ringer who dressed up as a hobbit and then Eowyn for Halloween, who has the Evenstar necklace, was unsatisfied. Then my roommate gave me the answer: "Every moment was like a parody of itself."

Tweeting in the Theater (No, Just No)

Like most people in their 20's (aka Millennials), I have a very intimate relationship with my cellphone. It's underneath my pillow when I sleep at night (not for any emotional reason, it's because the outlet for my phone charger is next to my bed and I don't own a nightstand). My phone is on my desk at work. It's in my pocket when I'm on the subway. And it has a name when I plug it into my MacBook: it's Pippin. In short, I probably spend more time with my phone than with any other piece of technology, jewelry or memento that I own. Who needs a teddy bear when you have an iPhone to hug at night?

Which is why when a cellphone goes off while I'm at the theater, I get irrationally angry. Why? It goes without saying but a cellphone ring is distracting and when you're at the theater, it takes you out of a connective moment that you were having with the actors on the stage.

Thoughts During a Hurricane

New York City, along with a majority of the East Coast was hit by a hurricane this past week. A hurricane named Sandy (who no doubt was looking for a man, probably one by the name of Danny). And this innocuously named hurricane caused some damage. In fact, quite a bit of damage.

Last year, I sat through Hurricane Irene in my apartment in Washington Heights, while making a cake and wondering, "It's awfully quiet for a hurricane."

This year was a bit rougher and for a California-raised girl like me, definitely a wake-up call in terms of how powerful Mother Nature can be. Because while we had earthquake kits in California, we were never cooped up in our houses for days with water and bread we stocked up particularly for the occasion.

Here are a selection of my thoughts during the hurricane, in no particular order.

1. Working from home is not nearly as fun as "working" from home. For one thing, you need to actually try to be productive while in your pajamas, which is a mutually exclusive state of being. And in my case, I had to try and work with a server where I had to download every document in order to view it, and upload it back up into the server if I changed it. So more time waiting for documents to download and upload, and needing that piece of paper on my work desk that I didn't think to bring home. Though working and "working" are similar in that you can sneak in a quick nap during the day and no one will ever know.

2. Believe or not, when you wear nothing but pajamas for two days straight, you feel dirty and like a slob. The dirtiness feeling confuses me because technically, I have not been outside so I have not been getting dirty. I wonder if it's a withdrawal symptoms from productivity.

3. A New York City without power looks, scarily, like the New York City in almost every disaster movie ever made.

A photo of lower Manhattan completely darkened by Hurricane Sandy

A still of Manhattan getting hit by a tidal wave in "The Day After Tomorrow

4. Similarly, a New York City without a subway system looks like Los Angeles during rush hour. Except in the case of New York City, rush hour lasts all day. On Wednesday, when the subways were still down, I tried to get to work via the bus. It took my 45 minutes just to get to the street leading to the Queensboro Bridge. Normally, after 45 minutes, I would have already been at work and had coffee.

I took this freeway home every weekend when I went to UCLA. It sucked. Balls.

Traffic post-Sandy and pre-subway system restoration. Deja vu...

5. Drinking during the daytime during a natural disaster is the New Yorker thing to do. During my pre-Sandy, hunkering-down-on-munchies grocery run last Sunday, beer was the hot commodity, followed closely by bread. Indeed, I was prepared for Sandy with, not just ice cream and bread, but a bottle of red wine and a bottle of Makers Mark. And when did I usually start drinking? 2 p.m. Right after lunch.

6. Disasters bring out the most generous and beautiful part of humanity. And New Yorkers show their generosity and kindness in the most unexpected of ways. Observe the photo below.

Courtesy of Buzzfeed

7. Wondering how your friends were doing during and post-Sandy? Just check Facebook. Sunday came the "I bought beer, food and have Netflix, going to catch up on TV during Sandy." Monday and was "It sounds like a vacuum cleaner outside." Tuesday was "I'm okay! But pray for those who are without power." As for the people without power, well, they didn't update Facebook, which obviously meant something was wrong. Because if they were okay, they would have updated their statuses to say that they were okay, since that's what friends do for their Facebook stalkers.

8. I feel very close to New York City now. Like in any relationship, we have been through a large, potentially deal-breaker event. And yet I am still here, still willing to keep the flame alive. I guess that means the honeymoon stage is over. And I'm officially dedicated to this relationship. Next up: 40-degree weather!

Racial Links and Musicals

I'm writing this blog post from my childhood bedroom in California, where I'm staying at my parents while researching a story on Tim Dang, the artistic director of East West Players, the oldest theater of color in the U.S, for American Theatre.

It is part of my (not-so-secret) ploy to give more visibility to the Asian-American theater artist plight. A plight that was given more flames this week when the Royal Shakespeare Company across the Atlantic pond decided to mount "The Orphan of Zhao," a classic Chinese tale with, you-guessed-it, Asians in minor rules. In fact, out of the 17 castmembers, only 3 are Asians and they are playing servants and a pet. Gregory Boyd, the artistic director of the RSC, calls the backlash against this decision "sour grapes," giving credence to the backlash, and proof that even when you are leading one of the most famous theater companies in the world, you can still be majorly insensitive to race.

Erin Quill writes a more proper, and passionate, summation on her blog.

This comes out in the same week where Bruce Norris, who wrote the Pulitzer-winning play Clybourne Park (about racial interactions and real estate), pulled the rights to his play from a Staatstheatre Mainz in Germany. The reason: they wanted to cast white actors in blackface to play African-American roles.

So in totality, not the best week in the world of race relations and casting. But tomorrow I'll be reporting on a panel at East West Players about the lack of Asians and Asian-Americans onstage. EWP was kind enough to invite me to it (and even had to go through the wrong Diep Tran in order to get to me). So the fight continues and I'm here to report on it. And hopefully not criticize too much afterwards.

But in other non-racial news, I wrote a blog post for "TCG Circle" this week about what I think is the new age of American musicals: the age of the small musicals. Or as I titled it (and I'm quite proud of this headline): Go Small or Go Home.

A snippet here:

Are we entering a new age of the American musical, where the imperative is not to go big, but to go small? And is folk a new musical genre? I can’t remember the last new musical I’d seen where there were chorus lines; bombastic, every-piece-in-the-orchestra-at-attention showtunes; or glory notes. Instead, it’s been character-driven stories where the actors sang their feelings, not belted them, and were accompanied by a piano and/or a guitar. Sometimes even a violin (the imperative word being a violin, not many violins).

These are all musicals that “whisper rather than shout.”

The example that sparked off this train of thought was from a PigPen Theatre Company, a troupe of five Carnegie Mellon graduates who have a penchant for folk tunes, shadow puppets and a dose of whimsicality. A video here to end the week (or to start the week, depending on when you are reading this post):



Have a good rest of the week. I'll be back in NYC on Wednesday.

A Conversation with My Boyfriend About Zombies

When killing zombies, it's best to have something sharp.
Still from Season 3, Episode 1 of "The Walking Dead" on AMC

Below is a conversation I had with my boyfriend about "The Walking Dead" and zombie mythology,. Because when you're in a relationship, you talk about anything and everything, including shows that you know the other person will never ever watch (He's been trying to get me into "Archer" for months now). Beware, slow-walking, moaning spoilers ahead.
 
Me: Tonight, I watched the Walking Dead and at the end of the episode, the main character chopped off another character's leg with a hatchet.

BF: Did he get bitten?

Me: Yeah, and he was the only person there with medical knowledge and really old, so it made no sense why they would bring him along on a suicide mission to take over this prison and fortify it.

BF: So they're going with the rule of, you get bitten, you turn into a zombie?

Me: Basically.

BF: Why did they chop off his leg if he was going to turn into a zombie anyway?

Me: No, in this world, everyone is a carrier for the zombie virus. A bite will just make you die faster.

BF: How fast? Are we talking about hours or days?

Me: Days. It's like Ebola. You die quickly and then you're reborn as a zombie. They had to chop his leg off before the virus infected the rest of his body.

BF: But he may still die because they don't know if he's been completely infected.

Me: Yeah.

BF: If these zombies were trapped in a prison, how are they still alive? Can they eat each other?

Me: No, zombies can only eat living flesh and zombie flesh is dead.

BF: Then why can't they just wait for the zombies to starve and decompose? Why are they so afraid of these zombies?

Me: ...It's a zombie show. If we followed the rules of nature, there would be no show. Are you going to start watching zombie movies now?

BF: Probably not.

And that is how you poke holes zombie mythology.

More Adventures in Non-Traditional Casting

Solomon Glave and Shannon Beer in
Andrea Arnold's new adaptation of Wuthering Heights

You know how I'm a stickler for non-traditional casting. And sadly, I hardly ever see any examples of it that really knock my socks off. I do not count Shakespeare because if there are any avenues where actors of color get the most roles, it's Shakespeare, which is now commonly reimagined in contemporary, multi-cultural scenarios.

And then I saw a beautiful trailer for a new adaptation of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, featuring a black Heathcliff (played by Solomon Glave and James Howson) and directed by Andrea Arnold.

I have to admit, as someone who loves the book (and really, any girl who grew up in any American high school who had to take English lit and has a penchant for bad boys loves Wuthering Heights), my jaw dropped when I saw this new Heathcliff. I thought it was an ingenious example of non-traditional casting, meant to show just how alien Heathcliff really was and to give more realism as to why he and Catherine were kept apart. And after all, the only cinematic Heathcliff I ever saw was Ralph Fiennes in the version with Juliette Binoche so Heathcliff was always white in my mind.

But then I did a quick skimming of the text and found this:

"He is a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman: that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire: rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure; and rather morose" - Wuthering Heights

Now the casting makes more sense and I would argue that it's closer to Bronte's original intent. I have to wonder why no one else has ever casted Heathcliff in this way. It would be more on the mark to have casted someone of Indian or Asian descent, because Nelly calls Heathcliff a boy whose "father was Emperor of China, and...mother an Indian queen. But it's definitely an example of casting that is out of the box and different than what has come before (all white men).

And speaking of non-traditional, I stumbled across a recent production of "Willa Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" at Berkeley Playhouse in California. And Vernon Bush, an African-American actor, played Willy Wonka.

credit: Larry Abel

And I have never imagined Willy Wonka looking like that. But that's the beauty of it, and the point. It's possible and does not require any suspension of disbelief.

Though, on a similar vein, I do not know what to make about "Cloud Atlas."



It's ingenious to have Halle Berry play a white woman, among other roles. Or Doona Bae, a Korean actress, play a white woman. But it skirts close to offensive to have Hugo Weaving and Jim Sturgess play an Asian man. We have had hurtful historic precedence of yellowface and blackface. But whiteface...not so much.

I don't know what to think. What do you think? And are there any other examples of non-traditional casting that has made you go "Oh! I have not thought of that role in that way before, but it makes so much sense now!"

Into the Park (Act II)

My new niece. Doesn't she make you want to pull a Witch and steal a baby?

And we're back...a month later. I have a good explanation for the long absence, I swear. It's called the October 152-page issue of "American Theatre" and a managing editor on maternity leave. And it was also called my sister Thao, who had a baby on August 15, which was the same day as my dad's birthday (who turned 69 this year). "Happy birthday daddy, I got you another granddaughter!"

And speaking of my daddy, my parents also visited for a week and a half to see their new granddaughter. This is grandkid #5 for them and apparently, it doesn't get old.

As for me, I was at the magazine's beck-and-call while at work and my mom's beck-and-call after work. And as for the boyfriend...he's been putting up with the family crazy and baby photos admirably (though he did say "I want 8 of those" when I showed him the above photo of my niece, I hope that's not a hint).

But I am determined to write about (the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park) "Into the Woods" dammit, because it's Sondheim and a large cast (practically unheard of these days) and now that my life is literally filled with children, it's even more appropriate, because children will listen. Which is why I tell my boyfriend not to swear so much in public but unlike my nephews and nieces, he doesn't listen to me.

But now that it's too late for a "is this show worth seeing or not?" type of review, I want to talk more about the show's concept, which is the thing I found most interesting and what I thought I remember most vividly since I saw the musical last month.

Spoilers abound in this analysis so proceed in with caution. Mind the path.