Yellow Face (c) Joan Marcus
Broadway: Yellow Face
At the Todd Haimes Theatre
Playwright David Henry Hwang has written for different genres from opera (Alice in Wonderland, The Fly) to musicals (Tarzan, Aida), usually adapted from various mediums. For his own personal works, the medium he adapts from his own life. Like his last musical, Soft Power, in Yellow Face, which is having a splashy Broadway revival after premiering Off-Broadway in 2007, the main character is DHH, and even if the story may veer into the fictional, it always seems to be inspired by real events in Hwang’s life. There are two major events in Yellow Face, and if you look at the playwright’s Wikipedia page, they did happen: Hwang (played with quizzical fun by Daniel Dae Kim) was one of the major players in the 1990 Asian American actors protest of Caucasian actor Jonathan Price playing an Eurasian man in the musical Miss Saigon and how that brouhaha lead to him writing his play Face Value, which was a flop, closing before it opened on Broadway. What isn’t as well known is that the actor cast as the Asian lead in the Boston try-out of Face Value was a white man named Marcus G. Dahlman (Ryan Eggold, in full clueless mode), which would be quite the egg on DHH’s face if it comes to light.
