the week of december 3 - 9, 2022
nothing's gonna KPOP us now
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icymi: bills, bills, bills
This month’s money diary from a marketing & PR director features an all-day video shoot, game show winnings, and buying your own jumpsuit for a community production of Mamma Mia!:
Here are the previous diaries in this series, which are also archived on the About page:
Jenna and I initially conceived Bills, Bills, Bills as a six-month trial feature, but it’s been such a rousing success that we’ll continue publishing monthly diaries for the foreseeable future.
in-person theatre
Talene Monahon’s Jane Anger runs December 13 - January 8 at Shakespeare Theatre Company. Jess Chayes directs the anachronistic Jacobean feminist revenge comedy that reimagines Shakespeare’s famed quarantine.
Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations starts performances December 13th at LA’s Center Theatre Group. The Tony-nominated jukebox musical is written by Dominique Morisseau, directed by Des McAnuff, and choreographed by Sergio Trujillo.
bb brecht’s Holiday Yuletide Spectacular will play a one-night-only special presentation on December 14th at New Georges. From creator Miranda Haymon, the “anarchic, queer, and very Black cabaret series explores alienation, didacticism, and epicness in a 21st century world using unboxing videos, green screens, TikToks, autotune — whatever our churning culture may hand bb brecht.”
Isaac Gómez’s What-A-Christmas! is now running through December 24th at the Alley Theatre in Houston. KJ Sanchez directs the new holiday comedy, which follows Margot, a “Tejana Scrooge” visited by spirits as she works the Christmas Eve overnight shift at a fast food drive-thru.
2023 season updates
The Tank announced its 2023 winter/spring season. The company will produce four world premieres: Carol Mazhuvancheril’s Song of Joy (directed by Nick J. Browne), Caitlin Saylor Stephens’ Modern Swimwear (directed by Meghann Finn with dramaturgy by Amauta Marston-Firmino), Morgaine Gooding-Silverwood’s sleeper, and Kev Berry’s Rough Trade (directed by Alex Tobey).
James Ijames’ Fat Ham is coming to Broadway next spring. A limited engagement of the Public Theater and National Black Theatre’s co-production of Ijames’ Pulitzer-winning comic riff on Hamlet will start previews in March, with director Saheem Ali and the entire original Off-Broadway cast returning.
the KPOP review controversy
The Broadway musical KPOP announced this week that it will close December 11th, less than two weeks after its official opening. (The LA Times’ Ashley Lee spoke with the creators about the abrupt closing, KPOP’s future, and the challenge of producing an original musical in the current Broadway landscape.)
KPOP struggled at the box office and received mixed reviews — including Jesse Green’s negative write-up in the New York Times, which drew extensive criticism on social media from cast members and supporters, citing offensive language and racist implications. Playbill’s Logan Culwell-Block wrote an excellent summary of the whole ordeal, but here are direct links to the various responses:
KPOP actor John Yi’s statement:
KPOP actor Abraham Lin’s response on the “inherently racist and wholly disrespectful” review:
Howard Ho’s line-by-line annotation of the review’s “constant errors, mischaracterizations, false assumptions, and even some offensive language” (Ho is the partner of cast member Jully Lee.)
Filipino-American dramaturg and writer Katy Zapanta’s open letter to Jesse Green to hold him “accountable for his racially coded language and his inability to criticize fairly and respectfully.”
Last weekend, in a letter obtained and published by Playbill, KPOP producers Tim Forbes and Joey Parnes requested a formal apology from Green for “the cultural insensitivity, underlying ignorance of and distaste for K-pop as a genre, and what comes across as casual racism in his review”, citing specific examples:
Starting with the headline, "(too) cute," Mr. Green’s choice of words to critique a work created primarily by API artists plays to harmful stereotypes and the historic infantilization of Asian people in media, immediately devaluing and diminishing them. Using "squint-inducing" to describe the work of a Korean lighting designer, whatever the author's intent, is a particularly egregious example.
Beyond specific words, Mr. Green's view that if "you don't understand Korean... (you) will have a harder time enjoying this show" is simply not borne out by the audience reaction he himself witnessed and as demonstrated in several of the comments now appended to the review. In fact, only a small fraction of the dialogue is in Korean, and the meaning is generally comprehensible in the specific context, which surely he knows. The comment smacks of a dog whistle. Is a Broadway show valid only if it is centered on and catering exclusively to a white, English-speaking audience?
…
The job of theatre critics is to dissect, analyze, and ultimately judge a work. We also contend that they have a responsibility to meet a show on its own terms and to be informed enough to know what that even means. Above all, in these troubled times, they have an obligation to do so with cultural sensitivity and absolutely without the casual racist tropes Mr. Green, wittingly or not, perpetuates.
You can read the full letter here.
On December 6th, The New York Times responded with a statement issued to The Daily Beast:
We saw the open letter written about The Times’s review of KPOP and quickly convened a discussion among editors and members of our standards department. This group was in agreement that Jesse’s review was fair. More importantly, we wholly disagree with the argument that Jesse’s criticism is somehow racist. We always welcome feedback and reaction to our journalism, and have conveyed a similar reply to the producers who wrote the open letter.
Playbill notes that no major news outlets sent Korean or Asian-American critics to review KPOP, which is why I am grateful to Brian Eugenio Herrera’s newsletter for signal boosting dramaturg/designer Christine Mok’s review of the production at 3 Views.
assorted playwright news
The 2023 Latinx New Play Festival is now open for submissions through December 31st. The festival — which will now take place at La Jolla Playhouse, following the closure of San Diego REP — is open to unpublished, professionally unproduced work from self-identifying Latinx/e playwrights living in the United States.
Huntington Theatre and Teatro Chelsea announced a Latine new play reading initiative. The two Boston companies will “explore and celebrate the work of Latine writers with a series of play readings, conversations, and convenings” over the next year, starting this week with a reading of Cuban artist and activist Yunior García’s Jacuzzi, translated by Melinda Lopez.
