Signature Theatre’s ‘Soft Power’ Sings and Stings (Review)
metroweekly.comSoft Power echoes the David Henry Hwang who wrote the book and lyrics for the show.Jeanine Tesori, Tony winner for Fun Home and Kimberly Akimbo, composed the tuneful score, and additional lyrics, for the satire, which Hwang had originally conceived of as a “reverse The King and I.” The idea, as the M.
Butterfly author explained to the audience on press night, was to have a Chinese person come to America, and, like Anna in The King and I, “teach an American ruler something important about civilizing their country.”As the collaborators first got to work on Power, in the months leading up to the 2016 election, the ruler Hwang had in mind was Hillary Clinton, who would learn something about gun violence.
But then, the fact that someone other than Clinton became POTUS altered the course of the plot, as did the real-life violent attack Hwang suffered in 2015 walking home from the grocery store in Brooklyn.The random stabbing, perpetrated by an assailant never apprehended, coincided with a rash of violent assaults against Asians around the city, and, perhaps not surprisingly, the incident bled into the fiction Hwang was conceiving at the time.Further developed for this Signature Theatre production, the resulting amalgamation of political satire, autobiography, musical fantasy, and old-fashioned romance is audacious and original, and realized with verve and class in Ethan Heard’s splendidly staged production.Steven Eng, dryly funny if a bit stilted, portrays the fictional David Henry Hwang, or DHH, enlisted by producer Xue Xíng, well-played by Daniel May, to write a Broadway-style musical that promotes the beauty of China and Chinese culture.
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