David Henry Hwang's new show is a twist on Rogers and Hammerstein's "The King and I." Kind of.
In that classic musical, a woman comes to Thailand and winds up teaching a backwards-but-noble king about leadership. In "Soft Power," a Chinese businessman who happens to be in the States is flabbergasted by Hillary Clinton's failure to win the presidency — and so he teaches her why she should love Communism instead.
Along the way, there are giant, sparkly McDonald's french fries, a life-size plane, men in short-shorts wearing roller skates, hints of "The Music Man" and "Pirates of Penzance," wonderful Jeanine Tesori songs with lyrics by Tesori and Hwang and oh — a framing device. This is all a dream in the dazed mind of the character David Henry Hwang who (like the real Hwang) has been attacked on his own street in Brooklyn for no apparent reason and stabbed in the neck.
It's a clever (if sometimes tortured) premise that allows the real Hwang to poke fun at white American narcissism, liberal academics, our country's obsession with guns, and the peculiar racism of the classic American musical. The mostly-Asian American cast is anchored by a full, earnest and strongly-voiced performance by Conrad Ricamora (who, deliciously, played Lun Tha in Lincoln Center's 2015 "King and I" revival.) He plays the businessman who tries to save Clinton and believes that Americans have too much freedom — because freedom is corrosive. He wants to open Americans' eyes to a better, Chinese way of doing things, and he thinks the best way to do that is to employ "soft power." That is, cultural persuasion of the musical theater variety.
This is a show that's stuffed with ideas like that, many of them provocative and some of them — like the ingenious second act opener — subversive in the best possible way. Would it be better if it were tightened? Maybe. But then it might lose its wild, barely constrained energy, that wheeling sense that anything can happen in the next scene. That kind of unpredictability is rare and risky for a musical. We should treasure it when we find it.
"Soft Power," book and lyrics by David Henry Hwang, music and additional lyrics by Jeanine Tesori, directed by Leigh Silverman at the Public Theater through Nov. 17.
