this week in theater

THE GOLDEN BRIDE (DI GOLDENE KALE)

The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene inaugurates its new home at the Museum of Jewish Heritage with THE GOLDEN BRIDE (photo by Ben Moody)

Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust
Edmond J. Safra Plaza, 36 Battery Pl.
Tuesday-Wednesday and Thursday-Sunday through January 3, $40
866-811-4111
nytf.org
www.mjhnyc.org

The utterly delightful Yiddish operetta The Golden Bride returns to New York City at just the right time, a very tasty appetizer to the latest Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof. But the work, known in Yiddish as Di Goldene Kale, is more than just a mere precursor to the award-winning 1964 musical and 1971 film about the Jewish experience in Tsarist Russia; it stands alone as an engaging celebration of shtetl life as it explores the hopes and dreams of its many charming characters. The operetta premiered in February 1923 at the two-thousand-seat Second Avenue Theater and ran for eighteen weeks before going on tour around America and the world; it was last performed in 1948 before disappearing into obscurity until musicologist, librarian, and editor Michael Ochs uncovered parts of the long-lost work while preparing an exhibition in 1992, then spent more than two decades putting it back together again. The new production kicks off the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s 101st season, the first in its cozy new 375-seat home in Edmond J. Safra Hall at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. In a small, close-knit Russian village, Goldele (Rachel Policar), an abandoned child raised by innkeepers Pinkhes (Bruce Rebold) and Toybe (Lisa Fishman), has suddenly come into a large inheritance at the death of her long-absent father, making her the most desirable woman in the shtetl. She is in love with Misha (Cameron Johnson), Pinkhes and Toybe’s handsome son, but she offers her hand in marriage to any man who can find her mother, who she is sure is still alive. Thus, cobbler Berke (Jeremy Weiss), choir singer Motke (Zachary Spiegel), and tailor Yankl (Adam Kaster) set off in a race with Misha to track down Goldele’s mother and marry the Golden Bride, who in the meantime is moving to America to live with her uncle Benjamin (Bob Ader), whose wealth has already turned the shtetl “upside-down,” as Pinches and Toybe exclaim, with the help of the chorus, “We’ll become as rich as Korach, / We’ll live, laugh, it’ll be a sensation. / The dear millionaire will be my guest, / The dear millionaire will be his guest, / I’ll give him kugel with tsimmes. / She’ll give him kugel with tsimmes.” However, Benjamin wants Goldele to marry his son, Jerome (Glenn Seven Allen), who just happens to be smitten with Khanele (Jillian Gottlieb), Pinkhes and Toybe’s daughter. “Don’t you know what I want? Come here, I’ll tell you. I want a kiss from your sweet little lips,” Jerome says to Khanele, who replies, “Oh, go away — it’s Sabbath already.” “You shouldn’t kiss on Sabbath?” Jerome asks, to which Khanele declares, “Certainly you shouldn’t. A lot you know about Judaism! Even a goy knows more than you.” In the second act, the action travels overseas to America, where everyone tries to establish their future, built on love and money.

The fully restored Yiddish theater favorite DI GOLDENE KALE kicks off the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s 101st season in a big, delightful way (photo by Ben Moody)

Performed in Yiddish with English and Russian supertitles, The Golden Bride is a complete and utter joy from start to finish. The music, by little-known Lithuanian composer Joseph Rumshinsky, who actually wrote nearly one hundred Yiddish operettas, is light and bouncy, while the lyrics, by Ukrainian-born Louis Gilrod, are endearing and playful. The libretto, written by Polish native Frieda Freiman but originally published under her husband’s name, is sweet and witty. “Listen to me, friends,” Misha says when defending his love of Goldele to her other suitors. “I have a cure for your loving hearts. Each of you take a large piece of wood and knock the foolishness out of your heads.” While there is no evidence that Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick and book writer Joseph Stein ever saw or read The Golden Bride or that Rumshinsky, Freiman, and Gilrod (who all moved to America from Eastern Europe between the ages of twelve and twenty-two) were influenced by the Sholom Aleichem stories that formed the basis of Fiddler, many intriguing similarities and coincidences abound between the two works, from dialogue (Jerome seriously asks Khanele, “Do you love me?” recalling what Tevye asks his wife, named, er, Golde) to subplots (matchmaker Kalmen goes through his little black book, trying to find husbands for several young women, including one named, er, Yente: “I have for you a bridegroom, a ‘waiter’ who washes ‘dishes,’ / He’s also a ‘salesman’ at Yonah Schimmel’s Knishes”) to the general depiction of shtetl life. However, Anatevka has a very different fate in store for its residents, as Fiddler is far more political and heartbreakingly realistic than Bride, although the latter did come out right before the Immigration Act of 1924 (aka the National Origins Act), which set a restrictive quota on immigration to the U.S. from Eastern Europe and Asia. The actors, most of whom don’t know Yiddish and so perform their parts phonetically, are excellent, led by Policar, who has major operatic chops, her voice echoing beautifully throughout the theater, and Johnson, with strong turns by Rebold, Fishman, Adam B. Shapiro offering comic relief as Kalmen and the women’s chorus/ensemble of Amy Laviolette, Tatiana Wechsler, Jessica Kennedy, Liza Miller, Isabel Nesti, and Alexis Semevolos. National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene artistic director Zalmen Mlotek conducts the fourteen-piece orchestra, situated behind the stage, while choreographer Merete Muenter makes clever use of the crowded set, which features a whimsical, homey design by John Dinning. To answer Jerome’s question, “Do you love me?” we say, yes, yes, we do love you!

(The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene and the Museum of Jewish Heritage have teamed up to provide free shuttle bus service to and from Columbus Circle for each performance. NYTF is also offering a free fifteen-minute Yiddish lesson and history of Yiddish theater forty-five minutes before each show. And on December 26 at 8:00, the museum will host “Dreaming in Yiddish: The Fourth Annual Adrienne Cooper Memorial Concert,” with Frank London, Sarah Gordon, Michael Winograd, and Joshua Dolgin presenting an evening of music from the 1999 album In Love and in Struggle: The Musical Legacy of the Jewish Labor Bund.)

STEVE

Close friends gather for a birthday party that goes awry in STEVE (photo by Monique Carboni)

The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 3, $25-$95
www.thenewgroup.org
www.signaturetheatre.org

Be sure to arrive early for the world premiere of the New Group’s Steve, which has been extended at the Pershing Square Signature Center through January 3. As you enter the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, the cast is already onstage, singing American standards and show tunes. (The music coordinator is Emmy-nominated writer, actor, musician, and radio host Seth Rudetsky.) It sets up a warm camaraderie that is about to be torn apart once the play itself begins. It’s Steven’s (Matt McGrath) birthday, and he and his friends are gathering at a Manhattan restaurant to celebrate. He’s there first with Carrie (Ashlie Atkinson), a large, gregarious lesbian with terminal cancer, something Steven refuses to acknowledge. “Dying sucks,” Carrie says. “You’re not dying,” Steven instantly responds. They are soon joined by Steven’s longtime partner, Stephen (Malcolm Gets), with whom he is raising a son, and another couple, their friends Matt (Mario Cantone) and Brian (Jerry Dixon). As the waiter, a flirty Argentine dancer named Esteban (Francisco Pryor Garat), quotes Twyla Tharp, the snark flies as the group trashes Broadway shows, movies, and celebrities, saving particularly choice bits for Mame, the Spanish version of West Side Story, Kristin Chenoweth, Audra McDonald, and Evita. “Esteban, you’ll have to forgive Stephen,” Steven says, “as he comes from a generation that fetishizes the lesser musicals of the early eighties.” The party takes a tense, nasty turn when birthday boy Steven reveals to everyone that Stephen and Brian have been secretly sexting each other. The narrative gets more interesting when debut full-length playwright Mark Gerrard and director Cynthia Nixon then present a different version of the same scene; initially, Steven had publicly admonished the electronic affair between Stephen and Brian, whereas in the alternate take, Steven proceeds with similar anger and frustration but without explicitly explaining why he is so upset. Yet another Steve becomes part of the fray when it is later learned that Brian and Matt are involved in a special relationship with trainer Steve, whom every man froths over at the gym. Despite the various issues, the friends and lovers try to make it through some tough times, all the while delivering a fast-paced patter of snide, exquisitely cynical comments. It’s hard not to enjoy the barbed banter even as you’re aware that the play depicts a nearly endless array of stereotypical images of modern gay life in New York City.

Matt (Mario Cantone) and Steven (Matt McGrath) discuss life, love, and loss in New Group world premiere STEVE (photo by Monique Carboni)

Matt (Mario Cantone) and Steven (Matt McGrath) discuss life, love, and loss in New Group world premiere (photo by Monique Carboni)

At one point, Carrie remembers how Stephen and Steven met, when the former would come to watch the latter perform as a singing waiter. “It was genius,” she says. “A love letter written in slow motion with the Broadway Song Book.” That thought can also be applied to Steve itself, although it moves at a swift, rhythmic clip and might be more deliciously decadent than outright genius. The excellent cast clearly is having a blast together, and that mood is infectious, although most of the characters end up being not very likable, doing not very likable things. But Carrie’s zest for life and her acceptance of her fate are energizing, wonderfully portrayed by a defiantly positive and upbeat Atkinson (Fat Pig), while Matt’s adorably childlike joie de vivre infuses the proceedings with sheer glee, as the cute and cuddly Cantone (Sex and the City, Laugh Whore) revels in being the comic relief. Most important, Gerrard (Andy Cohen Has a Big D***) and Nixon (Rasheeda Speaking, MotherStruck) succeed in making the audience feel like a part of this extended twenty-first-century family, from the bouncy singing at the beginning through all the bittersweet trials and tribulations to the heartfelt finale on Fire Island.

NIGHT IS A ROOM

Marcus (Bill Heck) and Liana (Dagmara Dominczyk) face some shocking changes in brilliant play by Naomi Wallace (photo by T Charles Erickson)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 20, $35-$85
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Naomi Wallace’s Night Is a Room is a brilliantly conceived drama that is as poetic as it is shocking. In modern-day Leeds, England, Liana (Dagmara Dominczyk) has tracked down her husband’s birth mother, Doré (Ann Dowd), and wants her to have a surprise reunion with Marcus (Bill Heck) for his fortieth birthday. A stylish and successful marketing account executive, Liana manages it all; she even brings festive party balloons for Doré, blowing a few up as they talk in Doré’s small garden. Doré gave up Marcus, who she called Jonathan, when she was fifteen; she is a plain, frumpy woman who speaks in disconnected non sequiturs, takes everything very literally, and has apparently lived a rather droll, boring life. “So. What do you enjoy? In your spare time?” Liana asks. Doré, who cleans houses, responds, “I like to do Sudoku at the back of the newspaper those little squares all waiting for me imagine someone thinks it up everyday maybe a computer I don’t know but there they are for me I’ve always been good at numbers I skip the news it’s gossip mostly grubby isn’t it?” A moment later she says, “The lottery numbers each week I like to add them up then divide them by the day of the week as fast as I can and then times them by the month I can look at a number any long number and break it down quicker than you can crack an egg do you like eggs?” It takes a while for Liana to convince Doré to meet with Marcus/Jonathan, but they finally agree to the reunion. The second act takes place in Liana and Marcus’s living room, where the couple is in the midst of some hot and heavy sexual activity as they await Doré’s arrival. Liana and Marcus, who have a daughter working at the Art Institute of Chicago, are redecorating their home. But a whole lot more than the décor is about to change.

Doré (Ann Dowd) is in for some rather strange goings-on in NIGHT IS A ROOM (photo by T Charles Erickson)

What happens next makes it impossible to discuss the plot any further, built as it is around a head-shaking, jaw-dropping twist that will have some members of the audience considering leaving at intermission and others scanning their brains, wondering just where things can possibly go in the third act. But sticking around is a necessity, as the surprises keep coming as two of the characters become mired in a spectacular, unpredictable verbal face-off, even if the denouement is a bit too pat. Night Is a Room concludes Wallace’s (The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East, One Flea Spare) three-play Signature residency, which began with And I and Silence and continued with The Liquid Plain; all three works take their titles from poems — Silence from Emily Dickinson, Plain from Phillis Wheatley, and Night from William Carlos Williams’s “Complaint” (“Night is a room / darkened for lovers / through the jalousies the sun / has sent one golden needle!”). Night has a lyrical elegance to it, despite, or maybe even because of, the subject matter. Heck (Cabaret, The Orphans’ Home Cycle) is fine as Marcus, but the play belongs to Dominczyk (Closer, The Violet Hour) and longtime character actor Dowd (Compliance, Candida), who are exceptional together, their rapport utterly fascinating in light of their shifting relationship. Oregon Shakespeare Festival artistic director Bill Rauch (All the Way, The Clean House) helms the production with an innate intelligence and a subtle beauty, letting the tension build and the story unfold at just the right momentum. Rachel Hauck’s three sets all focus on chairs, perhaps to encourage the audience to remain seated and not leave. Night Is a Room is one of the strangest, most challenging family dramas you’re ever likely to see, and it’s also one of the most rewarding if you allow yourself to get swept away in its unique and memorable world.

INCIDENT AT VICHY

Von Berg (Richard Thomas) and Lebeau (Jonny Orisini) discuss their fate in Signature revival of rarely performed Arthur Miller play (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday-Sunday through December 20, $55-$85
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Arthur Miller’s 1964 play, Incident at Vichy, currently being staged in a stark, powerful production at the Signature Theatre, isn’t set in the Twilight Zone, but it shares that series’ atmosphere of postwar anxiety. In the classic 1961 Twilight Zone episode Five Characters in Search of an Exit, an existential drama that combines Luigi Pirandello with Jean-Paul Sartre, series creator and host Rod Serling announces in the beginning, “Five improbable entities stuck together into a pit of darkness. No logic, no reason, no explanation; just a prolonged nightmare in which fear, loneliness, and the unexplainable walk hand in hand through the shadows. In a moment, we’ll start collecting clues as to the whys, the whats, and the wheres. We will not end the nightmare; we’ll only explain it.” Adding a bit of Beckett and Kafka to that mix, Miller tells the story of nine men and one teenager who have been escorted off the streets of 1942 Paris and left to wait in a dank, dilapidated detention room (the set is by Jeff Cowie), where they contemplate who they are, why they have been brought there, and how — and if — they will get out. In the room are Lebeau (Jonny Orsini), an antsy, nervous artist who desperately wants to know what is going on; Bayard (Alex Morf), a Communist electrician who has heard frightening rumors; Marchand (John Procaccino), a businessman who wants this all over so he can attend an important meeting; a quiet, nervous teenage boy (Jonathan Gordon); Monceau (Derek Smith), an actor who refuses to believe that anything bad is going to happen to them; a waiter (David Abeles) who has served the Major (James Carpinello) in his restaurant and assures everyone that the German officer is a decent guy; a Gypsy (Evan Zes) laying on the floor and clutching a pot; an old Jewish man (Jonathan Hadary) holding tight to his ragged bundle; Leduc (Darren Pettie), a brave, bold psychoanalyst and army veteran who has faced the Major on the field of battle; and Von Berg (Richard Thomas), an effeminate prince from an Austrian royal family.

Why they have all been abducted remains a mystery for quite some time, as the nine men and the boy appear to have little in common, from age, status, and looks to wealth, education, and rank and, most important, religion. It takes until twenty minutes into the play for Von Berg to ask the question that has been on everyone’s mind, including the audience’s: “Have you all been arrested for being Jewish?” It’s a tribute to the skill of the writing and the strength of Michael Wilson’s direction that this line is so strong without being overly obvious; it also helps make the play that much more relevant in the twenty-first century. “You don’t get any . . . special flavor, huh?” Lebeau asks Marchand, who replies, “What flavor?” Lebeau says, “Well, like . . . some racial . . . implication?” To which Marchand states definitively, “I don’t see anything to fear if your papers are all right.” Incident at Vichy might ultimately be about Jews in occupied Paris, but it just as easily could have been about the communist witch hunt led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s; the exploits of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which resulted in the blacklisting of many Hollywood writers (Miller himself was called to testify in front of the commission in 1956 but refused to name names; perhaps not coincidentally, most of the character names are not used in the show itself but identified only in the program); as well as the current debate over how to treat Muslim immigrants and Syrian refugees.

Leduc and Von Berg (Richard Thomas) are at odds in INCIDENT AT VICHY (photo by Joan Marcus)

Leduc (Darren Pettie) and Von Berg (Richard Thomas) are at odds in INCIDENT AT VICHY (photo by Joan Marcus)

The second half of the intermissionless ninety-minute play does indeed get more didactic as the characters debate their fate, particularly Leduc and Von Berg, but the bulk of the play still holds up extremely well. The acting is exceptional throughout, with stand-out performances by Thomas (Race, The Waltons) as the gentle Von Berg, who finds Nazism to be “an outburst of vulgarity”; Morf (Of Mice and Men, War Horse) as the very serious Bayard; Carpinello (Rock of Ages, Xanadu) as the possibly conflicted Major; the always engaging Procaccino (Love and Information, Nikolai and the Others) as the self-centered, well-attired businessman; and Pettie (Strange Interlude; Detroit, This) as the heroic Leduc. Leduc delivers one of the most critical lines, explaining, “Jews are not a race, you know. They can look like anybody,” making us all potential victims of Fascism. AJ Cedeño is the police captain, while Brian Cross is Professor Hoffman, the mastermind behind the operation. The tale also serves as a microcosm of the Jewish response as Nazism took hold in Germany and spread through Eastern Europe. Wilson (The Old Friends, The Trip to Bountiful) guides it all with a firm yet respectful hand, adding occasional strobe flashes that signal it’s time for the next person to meet his fate. Miller, who died in 2005 at the age of eighty-nine, had considered reviving Incident at Vichy during his 1997–98 residency at the Signature, which has finally brought it back for the ongoing celebration of the centennial of Miller’s birth, with A View from the Bridge now on Broadway and The Crucible to follow in the spring. The play debuted on Broadway in 1964, was first performed in London in 1966 with Alec Guinness, Anthony Quayle, and Nigel Davenport, and was made into a 1973 TV movie directed by Stacy Keach. The play, which was never considered one of Miller’s best, was revived in 2009 by the Actors Company Theatre, but otherwise it has not been seen in New York City for fifty years, making the Signature revival not only a welcome revisiting of the work but a timely, relevant one as well. “Where are we? What are we? Who are we?” the Major asks in Five Characters in Search of an Exit. “None of us knows, Major,” the Ballerina answers. “We don’t know who we are. We don’t know where we are. Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.” These are questions and answers that are in serious need of discussion in order to try to shed light on what is going on in today’s world.

A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS 2015

Macy’s holiday window display celebrates fiftieth anniversary of A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS (photo byt twi-ny/mdr)

Macy’s holiday window display celebrates fiftieth anniversary of A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Fifty years ago, on December 9, 1965, CBS broadcast what was to become an all-time holiday favorite, Charles M. Schulz’s A Charlie Brown Christmas. The twenty-five-minute animated program was directed by Walt Disney and Warner Bros. veteran Bill Melendez and featured a jazzy score by the Vince Guaraldi Trio that quickly became part of the national lexicon. The golden anniversary of the television show, which focuses on the noncommercial aspects of the Christmas season, is being celebrated with several special events this month, following the November release of the big-screen Peanuts Movie, in which Charlie Brown declares, “I just need to know the secret for doing something great.” A Brooklyn staple for seven years, A Charlie Brown Christmas Live is moving from the Lyceum to Redwood Studios in Gowanus, being performed December 11-13 and 18-20 ($12), with adults Justin Tyler as Charlie Brown, Gillian Smith-Esposito as Lucy, Susan Forman and Lauren Orkus as Snoopy, and Alden Ford, Doug Aho, and Sean Bradley as Linus; the show is directed by Mollie Vogt-Welch, with music by Stephanie Sanders on keyboards and Jon Shaw on bass. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can catch A Charlie Brown Christmas in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium on December 19 & 20 ($45-$80), with the big-screen projection accompanied by an inventive live musical score by the Rob Schwimmer Trio, followed by an audience sing-along of holiday tunes. Tickets include museum admission, so you can also check out the Met’s Christmas Tree and Neapolitan Baroque Crèche while you’re there.

Over at David Geffen Hall, the New York Philharmonic Principal Brass Quintet and the Canadian Brass join together again for the twentieth annual Holiday Brass concert on December 13 ($49-$69), consisting of tunes from A Charlie Brown Christmas as well as a Chanukah medley, Bach’s Bells, “Penny Lane,” “Joy to the World,” and other holiday songs, performed with the New York Philharmonic Percussionists. The festivities continue December 20 at the Carnegie Hall Family Holiday Concert, as music director and conductor Steven Reineke and the New York Pops play A Charlie Brown Christmas and sing-along favorites with the TADA! Youth Theater, Essential Voices USA, and members of the New York Theatre Ballet. But you don’t need any tickets to see Macy’s Herald Square Christmas windows, which depict six scenes, designed by Roya Sullivan, from the classic Charlie Brown Christmas show, with interactive elements that allow visitors to play Schroeder’s piano and to add their own character to the celebration. The windows will remain on view through January 4; you can see all the windows here.

ALLEGIANCE

Kei Kimura (Lea Salonga), her grandfather, Ojii-chan (George Takei), and brother, Sammy Kimura (Telly Leung), are relocated to an interment camp in ALLEGIANCE (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Longacre Theatre
220 West 48th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 14, $45-$149
allegiancemusical.com
www.shubert.nyc

Seventy-four years ago today, Japan staged a surprise attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, leading to America’s entry into WWII. It also led to one of the most shameful acts in U.S. history, as more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were forcefully removed from their homes and imprisoned in internment camps. The fictionalized story of one such family is told in the Broadway musical Allegiance, a timely, overly earnest, yet involving tale running at the Longacre Theatre. Allegiance tells the story of the Kimura clan, whose farm is seized by the U.S. government while they are marched to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming, where they live behind barbed wire, under strict rules — all because of their Japanese last name and ancestry. The family consists of elderly patriarch Ojii-chan (George Takei), single father Tatsuo Kimura (Christòpheren Nomura), daughter Kei Kimura (Lea Salonga), and son Sammy Kimura (Telly Leung). Sammy wants to join the U.S. Army, fighting for the right to defend the country in which he was born; meanwhile, his father, a Japanese native, refuses to sign a loyalty oath to America after the family’s internment, and Frankie Suzuki (Michael K. Lee), who also lives in the camp and has struck up a friendship with Kei, leads a protest when Japanese Americans suddenly become eligible for the draft. Caught in the middle is Mike Masaoka (Greg Watanabe), the real-life California-born national secretary of the Japanese American Citizens League, who is collaborating, in good faith, with the U.S. government over the treatment of the people in the camps.

Sam Kimura (George Takei) remembers where it all went wrong with his sister (Lea Salonga) (photo by Matthew Murphy)

As has been well documented, Allegiance was inspired by the true story of Star Trek veteran and social media sensation Takei, who was five years old when his family was forced at gunpoint to leave their Los Angeles home in 1942 and move first to a horse stable, then to the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas. The character of Sam Kimura, whom Takei plays as an old man at the beginning and the end — the main events are told in flashback — is based on not only Takei but also his father, Norman Takei, and war hero Ben Kuroki. The book, by composer and lyricist Jay Kuo (Insignificant Others), co-lead producer Lorenzo Thione, and Marc Acito (Birds of a Feather), is both passionate and predictable, trite and treacly, with underdeveloped subplots (primarily Sammy’s relationship with nurse Hannah Campbell, played by Katie Rose Clarke), and the songs are cliché-ridden and overzealous, featuring such giveaway titles as “Do Not Fight the Storm,” “What Makes a Man,” “Our Time Now,” and “Stronger than Before.” The cast is accomplished, led by Tony winner Salonga (Miss Saigon, Les Misérables), but Stafford Arima’s (Altar Boyz, Carrie) direction is fairly static and Andrew Palermo’s (The Other Josh Cohen) choreography lacks imagination. One wonders if the very urgent story would have been served better as a straight play instead of an overwrought, melodramatic musical. But the main reason the show exists is because of the tireless dedication of Takei, in his Broadway debut. Over the last several years, Takei, who played Lt. Hikaru Sulu on Star Trek for three years on television and then in six big-screen adventures, has become a leading figure in the battle over same-sex marriage (he married his longtime partner, Brad Altman, in September 2008) as well as other social causes (he has more than 9 million likes on Facebook and nearly 1.8 million followers on Twitter), and he was the subject of the 2014 documentary To Be Takei. Takei almost single-handedly has kept alive the truths behind the Japanese American internment camps, an issue that relates directly to the current controversy over Syrian refugees and possible databases of Muslim Americans. “These worrisome developments only strengthen my resolve to keep telling our story and remembering the past so we do not repeat it,” he notes on a handout that comes with the Playbill. Takei, with his big, welcoming smile, riotous sense of humor, and fearlessness in standing up for what he believes in, is an inspiring American, and it is heartwarming watching him in such an important, if not completely successful, Broadway production, one that will very likely have you teary as you leave the theater. For more on the show and Takei, you can follow his online “Trek to Broadway” here.

A NIGHT OF KYOGEN WITH MANSAKU NOMURA AND MANSAKU-NO-KAI KYOGEN COMPANY

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
December 10-12, $55-$85, 7:30
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
www.mansaku.co.jp

A Living National Treasure of Japan, Mansaku Nomura brings the troupe founded by his father in 1957, the Mansaku-no-Kai Kyogen Company, to Japan Society for three nights of performances of the six-hundred-year-old art form known as kyogen, a uniquely Japanese take on satirically comedic theater that was a kind of alternative to the much more serious noh discipline. (UNESCO has declared both to be Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.) Mansaku Nomura will be joined by his son, Mansai Nomura, and Yukio Ishida, each of whom has been designated a Holder of Important Intangible Cultural Property: Nohgaku, in three short plays each evening. In the solo piece Nasu no Yoichi, based on a chapter from The Tale of the Heike, Mansaku Nomura, who has been acting since he was three years old, trained in kyogen by his father and grandfather, portrays the title samurai who fought bravely in the Genpei War, in addition to three other characters. Mansai Nomura, who is most well known for playing Abe no Seimei in the two Onmyoji films and is also the artistic director of Setagaya Public Theatre, stars in Akutaro (Akutaro Reforms) as a young rebel seeking repentance. (Mansai Nomura was previously seen in New York City in March 2013 in Sanbaso, Divine Dance, a collaboration with Hiroshi Sugimoto that was copresented by Japan Society at the Guggenheim.) And in Bonsan (The Dwarf Tree Thief), a not-very-successful robber is intent on stealing a dwarf tree even as he’s taunted by the master of the house. At the center of kyogen is a focus on human imperfection, approached from a comic angle. Each performance will be preceded by a 6:30 lecture by Dr. Carolyn Morley, professor of Japanese literature and theater at Wellesley College. The celebration of kyogen, which means “mad words” or “wild speech,” also includes a Kyogen Movement Workshop for Kids on December 12 at 10:30 am ($20) and the adult program Kyogen Workshop: Movement + Voice on December 12 at 2:00 ($55), led by Mansai Nomura.