Two Terrific Things
Hello Hungry Readers,
I promise I have not forsaken books, but as you may know, the Tonys are this weekend, and I love theater. So much. I live in DC which has a robust theater scene, and I maybe stalk the Playbill website so I can find out when every musical releases a cast album, and have also trained YouTube to alert me every time a musical cast appears on a morning show.
So, while I have seen only one of the nominated shows this year, I have thoughts. And if you are thinking, Tara I don’t live near New York, I have great news. PBS (if you are in the US, elsewhere check if it’s streaming near you) has two Tony nominated shows currently available to watch, though only one was nominated this year.
“Great Performances” has the West End version of “Next to Normal” which has a fabulous cast. It is a show about living with bipolar disease and grief, and the ups and downs for both the person with bipolar and the rest of the family. It is absolutely not an easy show, but I adored it the first time I listened to the original cast which included Alice Ripley and Aaron Tveit. I had the chance to see a live version locally that included Brandon Victor Dixon and Rachael Bay Jones. So, I did not go in cold. But I appreciated this version a lot.
Also on “Great Performances” is the Tony nomimated “Yellow Face”. I confess this was staged locally last year and I looked at it and thought, yeesh, this is probably really good but it would take really careful directing to pull off. I have watched this live capture, and I think it does do that. The play is semi-autobiographical. David Henry Hwang weaves together a story featuring a version of himself who protests against the casting of a white person to play a Vietnamese character and then discovers he has accidentally cast a white person in his play as his Asian lead. (As far as I am aware the accidental casting of a white actor is the imagined part.) It does some fascinating race bending with many of the actors playing multiple roles. And Daniel Dae Kim does a wonderful job playing the fictional David Henry Hwang.
Daivd Henry Hwang was also behind (along with Jeanine Tesori) “Soft Power” which involves a fictionalized him and a fictionalized Hillary Clinton. I wrote about that show here.
And before I go, I should probably mention that King Kamehameha Day is next week. And while monarchies are bad, flowers and lei are pretty. Kamehameha Day features in my novella Of Kings and Queens, and also gets a very brief mention in Aloha to You.
Hope you have lots of fun things planned. Happy reading, watching, and whatever other ing verbs suit you.