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.
Yellow Face (c) Joan Marcus
There is also a third plot that surrounds DHH’s father (Francis Jue), whose bank has ties to China. This more serious thread feels tangential in the first two-thirds of the play, but dominates the final third, which sort of clashes with the mostly farcical events with the theater goings-on. Hwang tries to connect the dots about artistic representation and the racist implications that Asian Americans will never be perceived as full Americans, but it’s a stretch. There’s a lot to admire in the banking section, especially Jue (who played the same role in the Public Theater production in 2007), who gives the most sympathetic performance of the evening as the father, and his boastful relationship with DHH. Kim, mostly known for his TV works in shows like Lost and Hawaii Five-O, makes a fine Broadway debut as DHH, letting him shine in both the physical comedy and the more serious moments. Yellow Face, not to be confused with Yellowface, the current best-selling novel by R. F. Kuang, is a minor work by Hwang, but is still a lot of fun to start the new Broadway season.
McNeal (c) Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
Broadway: McNeal
At the Vivian Beaumont Theatre
All writers steal. The trick is to what degree. They steal from their own lives, friends’ lives, from history and maybe most egregious (at least in the eyes of playwright Ayad Akhtar’s new play McNeal) from other writers’ works. They may say it’s an homage, an inspiration or an adaptation, but when others cry plagiarism, it becomes more than a game of semantics. Recently anointed Academy Award winner Robert Downey Jr. plays the titular Jacob McNeal, a celebrated, if slightly misogynistic, novelist who is pompous enough to have panic attacks every October whenever the Nobel Prize is about to announce their Literature winner (The play is set in the near future, so McNeal would know he lost the award in 2024 to Korean novelist, Han Kang, a woman). McNeal’s soon-to-be published novel is his first with a female protagonist, written almost as if to silence his critics. But this being the slightly foreseeable future, Akhtar throws in the big question mark of our generation: artificial intelligence. So when his excitable agent (Andrea Martin) gives him a standard form that states that no part of the novel was AI generated, McNeal pauses. Is the novel written in part by ChatGPT as he is asked by a New York Times interviewer (Brittany Bellizeare) later in the play, or is there something even more buried going on as his estranged son (Rafi Gavron) and ex-girlfriend (Melora Hardin) seem to imply? McNeal is also unwell. As his doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles) tells him, his damaged liver is made worst by combining her prescribed medication with his excess drinking.
McNeal (c) Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
Director Bartlett Sher provides a spotless first-class production for this seemingly intimate play about a writer’s guilt that would seem dwarfed in the cavernous Vivian Beaumont Theatre, but when the writer is played by Downey, in his Broadway debut, it would seem maybe the whole of Lincoln Center wouldn’t be able to contain his energy. Surprisingly, Downey downplays McNeal’s excess, unlike Steve Carrell, who also made his Broadway debut in the same theater earlier this year in Uncle Vanya and played to audience’s expectation. While Downey occasionally breaks out into his devilish charm, he is mostly reactionary and defensive, which is a choice that might disappoint his fans. Jacob McNeal is no Tony Stark, he has a lot more layers, however morally plagiaristic they may be.
Safety Not Guaranteed (c) Julieta Cervantes
Theater: Safety Not Guaranteed
At BAM, Closing This Weekend
“Wanted: someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 91, Oceanview, Washington 99393. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. I have only done this once before—safety not guaranteed.” This is the classified ad (remember those) that catches the eye of Seattle Magazine journalist Darius (Nkeki Obi-Melekwe), who thinks this would be the perfect, quirky, personal interest story. The ad, based on a true-life joke ad seen in Backwoods Home Magazine in 1997, is the jumping off point for the new musical Safety Not Guaranteed, written by Nick Blaemire, with songs by Ryan Miller (of the rock band Guster), making its world premiere at BAM. The musical is based on a 2012 indie film of the same name by future Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow with Aubrey Plaza in one of her first starring roles as Darius. The ultimate writer of the ad, Kenneth Calloway, who was played by Mark Duplass in the film and is played in the musical by Taylor Trensch in his best performance to date. Kenneth, it turns out, is a bit quirky, borderline borderline disorder and a loner, so when he’s approached by Darius as someone interested in his time travel escapade, he’s a bit tentative. Darius herself is cautious but discovers a kinship with Kenneth, who shares a dissatisfaction with life and bad choices made in the past.
Safety Not Guaranteed (c) Julieta Cervantes
I wish the musical just focused on their relationship, but then it would be a rather short evening, so the show, like the movie, also includes Darius’ editor Jeff (Pomme Koch) and co-worker Arnau (Rohan Kymal), who come to Oceanview with her and have adventures of their own. But their stories feel very tangential to the Darius story, rarely overlapping and thus a bit extraneous, although both Koch and Kymal are fine in their roles. Obi-Melekwe is convincing as the conflicted Darius who knows she is with Kenneth under false pretense, but it’s Trensch who steals the whole show with his commitment to Kenneth’s antisocial personality, playing up the humor, the pathos and the pathology. As for the whole time-travel, sci-fi element to the plot, the writers lean into this element as well, although I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprising ending. Director Lee Sunday Evans mostly gives us a minimal production to focus on the story. Unfortunately, with one third of what happens on stage overshadowing the rest, Safety Not Guaranteed feels overstuffed for such an intimate show.
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