Review: In the Musical 'Soft Power,' China Whistles the Tune

There’s a wonderful moment like that in “Soft Power,” which opened at the Public Theater on Tuesday in a coproduction with the Center Theater Group of Los Angeles. A golden curtain sweeps away to reveal, silhouetted on a scaffold in a cloud of vermilion light, a 22-piece orchestra, digging into the opening notes of Jeanine Tesori’s triple-crème score. If an audience ever sighed as one, it does here.

What’s strange is that this musical moment does not arrive until 20 minutes into the show, by which point we have already seen — twice — a main character being stabbed in the neck and left to die on a Brooklyn street. The character will survive; we know that because he is based on playwright, David Henry Hwang, who survived just such an attack in 2015. Even so, the promise of those violins turns out to come with lots of provisos.

Such is the cleverness, and confusion, of “Soft Power,” which the authors call a “play with a musical.” Bristling with ideas that rarely are dramatized, let alone in such imaginative form, it is something of a miracle but also something of a muddle, the ideas scrambling over one another for prominence and the ingenious form unable to corral them. Still, those ideas — about the betrayals inherent in love, democracy and musicals themselves — are too exciting and important to dismiss by quibbling them to death.

That doesn’t make “Soft Power” any easier to parse than it is to praise; I’m not sure even its authors and hardworking director, Leigh Silverman, have mastered all the whirligig tricks of perspective they’ve set in motion. It’s the kind of show that deserves, and unfortunately needs, to be seen at least twice.

What’s clear enough, in those opening 20 minutes, is that a lightly fictionalized Chinese-American playwright also named David Henry Hwang (Francis Jue) agrees to write a musical for a prominent Shanghai producer, Xue Xing (Conrad Ricamora). Based on a hit Chinese movie that champions marital fidelity even at the cost of unhappiness, the musical is to bear the same unpromising title: “Stick With Your Mistake.”

But as Hwang collapses after the possibly racist attack — the timeline is jimmied a bit so that the stabbing takes place just after the election of Donald J. Trump — he imagines a different musical, the one we proceed to see. This one, called “Soft Power,” written by Chinese artists instead of Americans, is both a rueful romance like “Stick With Your Mistake” and a gleeful riposte to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I,” inverting that Golden Age classic’s fallacies and stereotypes to hilarious and pungent effect.

The “I” in the dream musical, which jumps back to the weeks before the election, is Xue Xing himself; his arrival in the United States, like Anna’s arrival in Siam in “The King and I,” is depicted with dozens of erroneous details. Xue lands at “New York Airport,” with its glorious view of the Golden Gate Bridge. (It’s rare for a set design, in this case by Clint Ramos, to get such big laughs.) The Americans Xue immediately encounters are violent, gun-toting lowlifes, played by Asian actors in whiteface and sporting absurd regional accents.

The “King” to Xue’s “I” is none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton, portrayed, like the 1951 musical’s King Mongkut, as a natural leader trapped in a primitive culture. Forced to pimp herself out for votes, Clinton (Alyse Alan Louis) first appears at a fundraiser at “the most famous American restaurant of all”: a McDonald’s misunderstood as a glamorous Busby Berkeley nightclub. In a production number reminiscent of “Trouble” from “The Music Man,” she strips off her red spangled pantsuit, revealing a Wonder Woman outfit beneath.

It isn’t enough; as Xue instructs her — and as circumstances subsequently bear out — democracy is a degrading and unreliable system. Voting itself is a backward Western ritual; it takes a patter song modeled on Gilbert and Sullivan to explain the idiocy of the Electoral College. When Xue suggests that the certainty of communism produces much better results, Clinton naturally takes offense but cannot, of all people, argue the point.

Even so, when Clinton, in a song reminiscent of “The Rain in Spain” from “My Fair Lady,” finally learns to pronounce Xue’s name, a romance sparks between them. This is first expressed in a delicious polka (choreographed by Sam Pinkleton) that winkingly salutes “Shall We Dance?”

Though not imitations of Golden Age hits, Tesori’s songs are loving tributes that swim in and out of currents of familiarity. Orchestrated by Danny Troob for that unusually large orchestra, they sound marvelous, and yet they don’t quite do the trick. It would take the brilliancy of Sondheim, especially in the lyrics — Hwang’s are bare-bones, devoid of panache — to pull off the necessary double act here: to succeed as worthy successors to the originals and satires of them at the same time.

Without that, the inner musical of “Soft Power” just isn’t in the same class as the classics it needles. In any case, in the second act (after a truly hilarious interlude I won’t spoil) the book goes haywire, spinning out its political thread but cutting short the romantic one. (President Donald Trump, called “Dear Leader” and set to drop bombs on “Cheatin’ China,” sucks up all the narrative air, even if he’s not physically represented.) The armature of “The King and I,” which helped maintain structure, is largely abandoned.

The cast works hard to keep the story standing. Jue makes a delightfully wry impression as Hwang; Ricamora is dreamy as Xue in the inside musical and subtly duller in the outside one. As Clinton, Louis is apt but underpowered, a problem most likely built into the role. It would take a Jennifer Holliday to pull off her 11 o’clock number, a full-out screamer of a tribute to democracy.

If a song can make you love a lie, or at least a complicated half-truth, this one does it. (It even gets a moving, anthemic reprise at the end of the show.) But it’s a strange complication that “Soft Power” critiques the seductive persuasiveness of musicals — the “soft power” of American culture — while also trading in it.

Though I admire the idea that a musical can embrace that kind of complication, ultimately it feels like a pulled punch when this one fails to answer its own question. Is democracy a classic virtue or just a mistake we stick to, a happy Rodgers tune to ward off fear? What if, despite Hammerstein, we have real reason to be afraid, and scarcely any to whistle?

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‘Soft Power’

Tickets Through Nov. 10 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; 212-967-7555, publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hour 15 minutes.

Credits Play and lyrics by David Henry Hwang; music and additional lyrics by Jeanine Tesori; directed by Leigh Silverman; choreography by Sam Pinkleton; sets by Clint Ramos; costumes by Anita Yavich; lighting by Mark Barton; sound by Kai Harada; hair, wigs and makeup by Tom Watson; sound effects by Bart Fassbender; projections by Bryce Cutler; special effects by Lillis Meeh; orchestrations by Danny Troob; dance arrangements by John Clancy; music contractor, Antoine Silverman; music director and music supervisor, Chris Fenwick; production stage manager, David Lurie-Perret. Presented by the Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, artistic director, Patrick Willingham, executive director, and Center Theater Group, Michael Ritchie, artistic director, Meghan Pressman, managing director, Douglas C. Baker, producing director.

Cast: Jon Hoche, Kendyl Ito, Francis Jue, Austin Ku, Raymond J. Lee, Alyse Alan Louis, Jaygee Macapugay, Geena Quintos and Conrad Ricamora.

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Review: In the Musical 'Soft Power,' China Whistles the Tune

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