Surae at Sundance Sits Down with Actor Daniel Dae Kim / January 27, 2024 by David Hwang

SALT LAKE CITY (Good Things Utah) – Surae sat down with Actor and Producer Daniel Dae Kim at Sundance. The prolific actor has appeared on the big and small screen on Lost, Hawaii Five-0, CSI, Star Trek, The S.H.I.E.L.D, Hulk, Joyride. Kim made history last year at Sundance when he brought the first Asian multicultural house on Main Street in Park City for the film festival. For the second year in a row, Sunrise Collective House made a presence at the 40th Sundance Film Festival in partnership with Gold House Co., The Asian American Foundation (TAAF), and Kim’s production company 3AD.

Kim says it’s not just representation but sharing stories of Asian Americans. The other stars who stopped into the Sunrise Collective House were Lucy Liu, Steven Yeun, and Chrissy Tiegen.

Kim is looking forward to several projects this year. He will be starring in the live action series on Netflix: Avatar: The Last Airbender. He’s now heading to South Korea for a film and then will appear on Broadway this fall in the production of David Henry Hwang’s comedy ‘Yellow Face,’ to be directed by Tony Award nominee Leigh Silverman.

Professor David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face Heads to Broadway / January 27, 2024 by David Hwang

Playwriting professor David Henry Hwang’s Obie-award-winning play, Yellow Face, is headed to Broadway in a new Roundabout Theatre Company production premiering September at the Todd Haimes Theatre. The production marks Hwang’s ninth Broadway show.

Based on the controversy that surrounded the 1991 production of Miss Saigon, when white British actor Jonathan Price was cast as the Engineer, a Eurasian character, the play centers around a fictional version of Hwang, DHH, as he mounts his 1993 play Face Value, based on the controversy. DHH begins Yellow Faceprotesting the use of yellowface in Miss Saigon, but finds himself embroiled in conflict when he accidentally casts a white actor in a lead Asian role in his own play.

Off Broadway Obie Awards To Ditch Annual Ceremony In Favor Of Winner Grants, Ending 68-Year Tradition / January 27, 2024 by David Hwang

Heidi Schreck accepting a 2019 Obie for 'What The Constitution Means To Me'
Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for the 2019 Obie Awards.

The Obie Awards, the venerable honors for outstanding Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway productions, is doing away with its annual ceremony and will instead use the funds to provide winners with grants ranging from $1,000-$5,000.

Heather Hitchens, the president and CEO of the American Theatre Wing, which presents the Obies, called the grants a new path forward for the awards, saying the move “genuinely reflects the ethos of the Awards as well as the Off & Off Off Broadway movements – which is to continuously evolve and meet the moment.”

Select winners of this year’s 67th Obie Awards will be announced Saturday on New York’s Spectrum News NY1 as a special presentation of the channel’s On Stage program hosted by Frank DiLella. The special airs at 7:30 p.m./ET.

‘Pirates of Penzance,’ ‘English’ and ‘Yellow Face’ Bound for Broadway / January 12, 2024 by David Hwang

Daniel Dae Kim, left, will star in the play “Yellow Face,” while Ramin Karimloo, center, and David Hyde Pierce, right, will lead a revival of the musical “The Pirates of Penzance” on Broadway next season.Credit...From left: Isabel Infantes/Reuters; Cindy Ord/Getty Images For SiriusXM; Mike Coppola/Getty Images

Roundabout Theater Company, the biggest nonprofit on Broadway, said it would produce the three shows next season.

Roundabout Theater Company, the biggest nonprofit operating on Broadway, is planning to stage a jazz-inflected production of “The Pirates of Penzance,” Gilbert and Sullivan’s famed 19th-century comic operetta, in the spring of 2025, the organization said Tuesday.

Next season it also plans to stage the first Broadway productions of two plays: “English,” Sanaz Toossi’s work about a group of Iranians trying to learn English, which won last year’s Pulitzer Prize in drama, and “Yellow Face,” David Henry Hwang’s semi-autobiographical play sparked by the controversy over the castingof a white performer as a Eurasian character in the original production of “Miss Saigon.”

All three shows will be staged at the Todd Haimes Theater, which is currently called the American Airlines but is about to be renamedfor the Roundabout chief executive and artistic director who died last year after four decades with the organization.

Daniel Dae Kim talks about returning to Broadway in ‘Yellow Face’ / January 12, 2024 by David Hwang

In this exclusive interview, the actor and producer reveals how the upcoming production came to be, his admiration for playwright David Henry Hwang and his onstage roots.

Daniel Dae Kim stood in a studio with playwright David Henry Hwang and director Leigh Silverman recording the audio version of Hwang’s play “Yellow Face” when the trio looked at each other and asked: “Why isn’t this on Broadway? Why hasn’t this been on Broadway?” Kim recalled.

First mounted in 2007 by Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles, “Yellow Face” follows a playwright named DHH who protests the casting of non-Asian actor Jonathan Pryce as a Vietnamese character in “Miss Saigon.” As DHH’s protests largely go unanswered, he writes a play called “Face Value” about the “Miss Saigon” controversy and casts an actor who he believes is part Asian in one of the lead Asian roles — only to find out that the actor is fully white.

‘Yellow Face,’ Starring Daniel Dae Kim, Opening On Broadway in September / January 12, 2024 by David Hwang

Roundabout Theatre Company will also produce a revival of 'Pirates of Penzance,' starring David Hyde Pierce and Ramin Karimloo.

Daniel Dae Kim will star in the Broadway premiere of David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face next season.

The play, which is inspired by real events, follows a playwright protesting the casting of white actors playing Asian roles in Miss Saigon, and then mistakenly casting a white actor as an Asian lead in his own play. Yellow Face, directed by Leigh Silverman, is scheduled to start previews at what will be the newly renamed Todd Haimes Theatre (formerly the American Airlines Theatre but renamed after the death of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s artistic director) in September 2024.

Bay Area theater scene bounced back in 2023 — here were 10 top shows / January 4, 2024 by David Hwang

Like their fellows all over the country, Bay Area theaters are still slowly recovering from the pandemic, rebuilding audiences while often cutting back on staff and shows in their seasons. Some, like Berkeley’s TheatreFIRST, have closed their doors, while others, such as TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, had emergency fundraising campaigns.

And then there’s a few that have proven unforgettable. Here are 10 standout shows that have stuck with us for one reason or another, or for all the reasons in the world.

“Chinglish,” San Francisco Playhouse: David Henry Hwang’s comedy about a fish-out-of-water American businessman trying to brazen his way through the intricate subtext of doing business in China was hilarious when it played Berkeley Rep back in 2012, and it’s only gotten better as Hwang has revised it. That was especially true in director Jeffrey Lo’s superb staging at SF Playhouse, with a terrific cast headed by Michael Barrett Austin as the hapless entrepreneur and Nicole Tung as the government functionary who helps him navigate for her own reasons.

Eugene O'Neill Theater Center to Honor Lynn Nottage with 22nd Annual Monte Cristo Award and Gala / November 7, 2023 by David Hwang

Nottage, the first and only woman to receive two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, was in residence at the O'Neill in 2006.

The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center has announced that it will present the 22nd annual Monte Cristo Award to playwright and screenwriter Lynn Nottage. Nottage will be honored with a gala celebration Monday, November 6, at Capitale in New York City.

Nottage was in residence at the O'Neill in 2006 while writing her Pulitzer Prize-winning play Ruined. She received a second Pulitzer for her 2015 play Sweat, making her the first and only woman to receive the honor twice.

The 2023 gala is directed by Seret Scott, and will feature special performances by Quincy Tyler Bernstein, Tonya Pinkins, Jason Bowen, Gabby Beans, Stacey Sargeant, CJ Wilson and Joyce Sylvester, among others. The evening’s gala committee includes Michael Douglas & Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stephen & Ruth Hendel, David Henry Hwang, Genia Kaplan Quinn & Dr. Bruce Quinn, Dominique Morisseau, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, The Nederlander Organization, Tom Viertel & Pat Daily, and Constanza Romero Wilson.

Memories of a Soldier from Chinatown, by 12 Speakers / October 23, 2023 by David Hwang

Danny Chen, who died by suicide after being subjected to hazing in Afghanistan, will be memorialized by readers, including a well-known playwright.

Good morning. It’s Tuesday. We’ll find out about a commemoration for a soldier from Chinatown who died by suicide after being subjected to hazing by other soldiers in Afghanistan. We’ll also see how the first day of Donald Trump’s civil trial unfolded.

A dozen people will stand on a street corner in Lower Manhattan this morning. Each will read a paragraph about Pvt. Danny Chen, who died by suicide after being subjected to hazing and taunts by other soldiers in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, 12 years ago. This is from the paragraph that will be read by Anthony Chen, a cousin who is a college student:

“His funeral was the first funeral I’d ever attended. I was 8 years old. I didn’t know what was going on. Seeing Danny in a casket for the first time was surreal. Danny was always the jokester in the family. I thought any minute now he would pop up and surprise everyone, and everything would be OK.”

The last of the readers at the commemoration will be the playwright David Henry Hwang, who wrote the libretto for an opera inspired by Private Chen’s story, “An American Soldier.” With music by Huang Ruo, it had its premiere at the Opera Theater of St. Louis in 2018 and will be staged in May at the new Perelman Performing Arts Center near One World Trade Center.

David Henry Hwang and James Ijames Join Dramatists Guild Foundation's Board of Directors / October 23, 2023 by David Hwang

Dramatists Guild Foundation has announced that acclaimed, Award-winning playwrights David Henry Hwang and James Ijames join the Board of Directors to help shape and guide the organization’s mission to support theater writers at all stages of their careers.

“On the stage, David and James write stunning and impactful stories that stay with you long after you leave the theater. Off the stage, they work to shape a better future for those looking to tell their stories. We are thrilled and deeply honored to have their voices on our leadership team,” DGF’s Executive Director Rachel Routh said.

David Henry Hwang’s stage works include the plays M. Butterfly, Chinglish, Yellow Face, Golden Child, The Dance and the Railroad, and FOB, as well as the musicals Aida (reconceived revival launched 2023 in Europe), Soft Power, Flower Drum Song and Disney’s Tarzan. Called America’s most-produced living opera librettist by Opera News, he has written thirteen libretti, including five with composer Philip Glass. His screenplays include M. Butterfly and he is penning an Anna May Wong biopic to star actress Gemma Chan. Hwang co-wrote the Gold Record “Solo” with the late pop music icon Prince and was a Writer/Consulting Producer for the Golden Globe-winning television series The Affair from 2015-2019. He is currently show running and creating A New Television series, Billion Dollar Whale. A professor at Columbia University and recent Chair of the American Theatre Wing, Hwang is a Tony Award winner and three-time nominee, a Grammy Award winner and two-time nominee, a three-time OBIE Award winner, and a three-time Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. He was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 2018 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021; his star was unveiled on the Lucille Lortel Playwrights Sidewalk in 2022.

A Starry Debut for NYC's New Cultural Landmark / September 19, 2023 by David Hwang

David Henry Hwang, Jenn Freeman, and Sonya Tayeh.

The most buzzed-about debut in New York City this week wasn’t at a fashion show, but instead downtown on September 14 when the Perelman Performing Arts Center finally opened its doors.

The inaugural event at the anticipated cultural hub was a starry affair ahead of the September 19 public opening, with guests including Robert De Niro, Cherry Jones, Lynn Nottage, Rosario Dawson, James Taylor, Whoopi Goldberg, Amanda Gorman, and John Leguizamo joining Michael R. Bloomberg, the chair of the PAC’s board of directors, executive director Khady Kamara, and artistic director Bill Rauch for an evening of music, dance, poetry, comedy and more.

The lucky crowd’s first peek at the new PAC also included cocktails and snacks (by Marcus Samuelsson Restaurant Group, which will open a restaurant at PAC this fall) in the David Rockwell-designed lobby and music from DJ Elle Dee.

Reframing 9/11, with Theater. / September 15, 2023 by David Hwang

The new performing arts center at the World Trade Center smartly decided to hold its official opening day ceremony on Wednesday, not today. But if all goes well, the marble cube of the Perelman Performing Arts Center (nicknamed PAC NYC) promises to replace the current recurring images of the World Trade Center site: surely, it’s more eye-catching than the two beams of light meant as an annual memorial on September 11th; maybe it will even push from memory the images of the attack on September 11th, 2001 and of the stark, smoldering ruins afterward. After all, the 4,896 slabs of marble that make up the PAC’s exterior wall will glow every night. The glow has already made for some striking magazine spreads in Architectural Digest, and New York Magazine, and, a bit oddly, Vogue.

Authors Michael Chabon, David Henry Hwang, others sue ChatGPT maker for copyright infringement / September 15, 2023 by David Hwang

*The lawsuit is at least the third proposed copyright-infringement class action filed by authors against Microsoft-backed OpenAI.*
***Anthony Behar/Sipa USA***

A group of US authors, including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, has sued OpenAI in federal court in San Francisco, accusing the Microsoft-backed program of misusing their writing to train its popular artificial intelligence-powered chatbot ChatGPT.

Chabon, playwright David Henry Hwang and authors Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise Snyder and Ayelet Waldman said in their lawsuit on Friday that OpenAI copied their works without permission to teach ChatGPT to respond to human text prompts.

Chabon’s representatives referred queries about the lawsuit to the writers’ lawyers. Those lawyers and representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.

Michael Chabon, David Henry Hwang, Other Writers Sue Meta AI Platform LLaMA For Copyright Infringement, Seek Class Action Status / September 15, 2023 by David Hwang

Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Chabon and Tony-winning playwright David Henry Hwang are among a group of writers that filed a class action lawsuit against Meta in San Francisco federal court for having “copied and ingested” their works to train its LLaMA AI platform.

Plaintiffs also including authors Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise and Ayelet Waldman are seeking class action status for the suit, which says their copyrighted books appear in the dataset that Meta has admitted to using to train LLaMA.

“Plaintiffs and Class members did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training materials for LLaMA,” said the group, which filed a similar suit last week against ChatGPT parent OpenAI.

YELLOW FACE Comes to Grand Central Art Center / September 8, 2023 by David Hwang

Yellow Face opens on Friday September 15, 2023.

The Wayward Artist presents the Obie Award winning play Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang. Also selected as a “finalist” in the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Yellow Face performances begin Friday, September 15th and run through Sunday, September 24th at the Grand Central Art Center in downtown Santa Ana. This acclaimed theatrical work is unique in that it is both fact and fiction.

In an interview with the Washington Post, David Henry Hwang said, “The main character is named after me and based on me. There are some things in it that are true and there are some things in it that aren’t true. There is this kind of postmodern idea of playing with your own identity in the construct of yourself as the author.”

Ten Broadway hits that are yet to be seen in the UK / September 8, 2023 by David Hwang

*West End / Broadway, © Andy Bird (CC BY-SA 2.0)/Kevin Poh (CC BY 2.0)*

When will these theatrical gems debut on our stages?

AIDA

Lyricist Tim Rice had been hinting at a London premiere for Aida back in 2020 but there have been no official announcements made since then for this Disney Theatrical title, which also features music by Elton John and a book by Linda Woolverton, Robert Falls and David Henry Hwang. A Stage Entertainment production is currently taking bookings at Scheveningen’s AFAS Circustheater in the Netherlands until 31 January 2024, so we have our fingers crossed that a UK premiere might still be “written in the stars” after this.

The Perelman Performing Arts Center Is About to Open—A Beacon for Downtown New York / September 8, 2023 by David Hwang

CENTER STAGE
In one of the building’s state-of-the-art auditoriums, model Sherry Shi (left) wears a Balenciaga dress; balenciaga.com. Model Abby Champion wears an Alexander McQueen blazer and pants; alexandermcqueen.com.

If you work or live near the World Trade Center, you are regularly confronted with impermanence. A pathway that has been blocked for months (years?) by plywood partitions and concrete barricades is suddenly accessible as a corridor for authorized vehicles and swarms of tourists. Corrugated tin walls, a shield for large-scale HVAC equipment resembling steampunk vents, become a cheery Instagram backdrop when splashed with colorful murals. A biergarten sprouts on a concrete patio; a subway entrance improbably opens where the sidewalk seemed impermeable. Men in suits have been supplanted by nannies pushing strollers into the Wall Street–adjacent Whole Foods. This corner of New York grows in unpredictable ways.

So those of us who watched the construction of the giant marble cube next to the memorial might be forgiven for a little nonchalance: another set of steel foundations, dug deep then stretching high. But the opening of the Perelman Performing Arts Center—or PAC NYC—marks a historic moment: The last public building erected as part of the original master redevelopment plan for the World Trade Center site created by Daniel Libeskind, it has been two decades in the making, hamstrung not only by bureaucratic complexities but by stalled design plans and a rotation of artistic organizations—the Joyce Theater, the Drawing Center, the Signature Theatre, New York City Opera—that each had, at one point, been proposed as potential tenants. (The man after whom the center is named, Ronald O. Perelman—he declined to speak for this story—while credited with providing the initial funding, is no longer the biggest donor. That honor belongs to Michael Bloomberg.)

The program, of course, will be central to that, and it is being designed by artistic director Bill Rauch, who formerly led the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The first new commission—and first world premiere—for the center, Watch Night, is a collaboration between the legendary dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones, poet Marc Bamuthi Joseph, composer Tamar-kali, and dramaturge Lauren Whitehead that draws upon spirituals, opera, and slam poetry. Next year, the center will host Huang Ruo and librettist David Henry Hwang’s opera An American Soldier; a comedy from the group behind Reservation Dogs, which spans 90 years in the life of a fictional Native American family; as well as a reimagined version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats set amid the Ballroom culture of the 1970s. And that’s just a sampling.

Schele Williams, the Directing Whiz Behind the New ‘Wiz’ and ‘Aida’ / September 8, 2023 by David Hwang

*Schele Williams on the first day of rehearsals for "The Wiz." (Photo by Jeremy Daniel)*

This passionate director, once a performer in ‘Aida,’ returns at the helm of a revised production, as well as of ‘The Wiz,’ bound for Broadway and a new generation.

The word revival, according to Schele Williams, means to give new life. But in order to give something a future, one must be willing to fully unpack and understand the meaning of its past.

Williams, a busy actor, director, and author, has recently been tasked with giving new life to two beloved Broadway classics, Aida and The Wiz. As a member of the original Broadway cast of Aida, and growing up on the story of The Wiz, Williams understands the weight these stories hold in the Broadway canon, and especially in the context of Black culture. She is passionate about continuing the tradition by passing down these tales to the next generation, but she is aiming to ensure that both of these new iterations resonate with audiences as they once did with her.

The Aida revival, currently running at AFAS Circustheater in Scheveningen, the Netherlands, was to have a developmental lab in the spring of 2020, but when COVID paused the rehearsal process, Williams used the time to rethink how the story would land with audiences when theatres reopened. “We went back into the show and said, okay, this is different,” Williams said. “The world is different. We have shifted. We’re better artists now. Let’s break the show open and do a full rewrite.”

That rewrite, which involved original book writer David Henry Hwang, consisted of new research into Nubian and Egyptian history that Williams said was absent from the original staging. She is weaving this throughout the set, characters, costumes, and script—without making you feel like you are in a history class. “It’s not a documentary,” she said. “It’s still an Elton John musical, but are there moments in history we can glean and use to actually tell something that is unexpected?”

Picket Sign Roundup: “We Want A Fair Wage, They Want Us Homeless” / August 30, 2023 by David Hwang

One picketer said it best: “The longer this strike goes, the more detailed these signs get.”

Judging by some of those Simpsons-themed placards, he’s not wrong. But there have also been lots of not-so-veiled references to some of the ongoing strike coverage. (Don’t recognize the reference to Carol Lombardini and The Cheesecake Factory? Read this story. Can’t remember the exact quote about putting people out of their homes? That notorious line originated here.)

Some of the signs also just show signs of fatigue. “I’m gonna be honest I’m running out of clever sign memes,” said one. “Cause, like, seriously?”

It’s now day 120 of the WGA strike and Day 47 of the SAG-AFTRA strike. Here’s what some picketers have to say these days about walking the line.

American Composers Orchestra Announces 2023-24 Season & Collaborations / August 14, 2023 by David Hwang

The American Composers Orchestra (ACO) released its 2023-24 season lineup and exciting collaborations.

This article features vocal related works only.

Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang’s Opera “An American Soldier” makes its New York Premiere at the Perelman Arts Center in NYC. Carolyn Kuan conducts.

Performance Dates: May 12-19, 2024