David Henry Hwang and others named to board of Entertainment Community Fund

Annette Bening continues as board chair.

The Entertainment Community Fund has announced four new board members. David Henry Hwang, Robert (Toby) McDonough, Frank Nocco and Katherine Oliver were appointed to the board of the national human services organization, which provides financial assistance, health and wellness services and more to the entertainment industry. The announcement was made at the Fund’s annual board meeting on June 5.

Playwright Hwang won a Tony Award for his 1988 play “M. Butterfly.” A three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, his play “Yellow Face” will make its Broadway premiere in October.

Read more at Broadway News

Entertainment Community Fund Adds New Board Members

David Henry Hwang (Tricia Baron)

Among the inductees is Tony Award-winning playwright and librettist David Henry Hwang.

The Entertainment Community Fund (ECF) has appointed four new members to its board of trustees, including Tony winner David Henry Hwang, Robert (Toby) McDonough, Frank Nocco, and Katherine Oliver. Annette Bening will continue to serve as Chair of the board. 

Hwang is a Tony Award-winning playwright and librettist whose work includes Aida, M. Butterfly, Flower Drum Song, Yellow Face (which is headed for a Broadway revival in fall 2024), and more. McDonough currently serves as Treasurer of Local One, IATSE, after working as a stagehand for 20 years and a Local One officer for 23. Nocco is the Head of Weil’s U.S. Structured Finance and Derivatives practice and Co-Head of the Global Structured Finance and Derivatives practice, and Oliver is a former Commissioner of the NYC Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment and a founding Principal of Bloomberg Associates.

Read more at Playbill

‘Yellow Face’ Explores Identity Across Generations, Continents

“I’m always thinking about, ‘why are we doing this play now?’,” actor Michael Hisamoto told the Sampan of the Lyric Stage production of “Yellow Face.”

Hisamoto has a key role in the play, written by David Henry Hwang. The semi-autobiographical show is about the playwright, who appears in the play and is the narrator. It’s about Hwang’s life, his father, and the period of the 1990s and the 2000s. It covers big themes like the “yellow peril” and the Asian scares, even campaign finance scandals.

“He is trying to tell all that through a vessel, a character, Marcus G. Dahlman. He is a white person that gets mistaken for Asian, embraces that he is Asian American, and it all becomes a conversation about who gets to decide what your race is, where you belong in the community, and eventually working toward a future in which race really does not matter, in a positive way, and in which people can be who they want to be,” said actor Alexander Holden, who plays Dahlman.

Read more at Sampan

Interview: David Henry Hwang Discusses YELLOW FACE Audible Drama Ahead of Play's Broadway Debut

The Audible adaptation of Hwang's play is available now

It’s a big year for Yellow Face, the 2007 play by David Henry Hwang.

At the beginning of May, a brand new audio version of Yellow Face debuted on Audible, which features a starry cast that includes Daniel Dae Kim, Benedict Wong, Ashley Park, Jane Krakoswki, and many more stars across the stage and screen.

In October, the play will make its Broadway debut at the Todd Haimes Theatre, also with Daniel Dae Kim and again directed by Leigh Silverman, who helmed the original Off-Broadway production and the Audible drama.

Yellow Face, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2008, sees a fictionalized version of Hwang as navigates the difficult worlds of media and politics as an Asian-American playwright in the 1990s and 2000s. 

Read more at Broadway World

Soft Power, In the Heights, Job, Primary Trust, More Set for Signature's 2024-2025 Season

The Arlington, Virginia, venue's upcoming season will include four D.C.-area premieres.

Signature Theatre’s 2024-2025 season in Arlington, Virginia, will feature five musicals and two plays, four of which are D.C.-area premieres.

The 35th season will launch August 6–September 15 in the MAX Theatre with the D.C. premiere of the musical Soft Power, featuring a book and lyrics by Tony winner David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) and music and additional lyrics by Tony winner Jeanine Tesori (Fun Home, Kimberly Akimbo). Signature Associate Artistic Director Ethan Heard will direct the musical, which is set after the 2016 election, when a Chinese American playwright is attacked by an unknown assailant and hallucinates a King and I-esque Golden Age musical comedy about a Chinese theatre producer and Hillary Clinton falling in love.

Read more at Playbill

Peterborough’s New Stages Theatre Company closes season with Pulitzer Prize finalist ‘Yellow Face

New Stages Theatre Company is presenting a cast of six professional actors to perform a staged reading of David Henry Hwang's Pulitzer Prize finalist play "Yellow Face" at Market Hall Performing Arts Centre for one night only on June 9, 2024. Pictured (left to right, top and bottom) are Norman Yeung, Colin Doyle, Richard Tse, Tina Jung, M. John Kennedy, and Chloë Dirksen. (kawarthaNOW collage of supplied photos)

For the final production of its 2023-2024 season, Peterborough’s New Stages Theatre Company is presenting a staged reading of Yellow Face by Tony Award-winner and three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist David Henry Hwang.

Almost 80 per cent sold out, the final production will be put on for one night only at Market Hall Performing Arts Centre at 7 p.m. on Sunday, June 9th. The evening will include a special post-show question-and-answer session with the performers and guests, as well as an announcement about New Stages’ 2024-25 season.

Yellow Face is a fast-paced, hilarious, and thought-provoking contemporary comedy about a playwright who, despite being an advocate against “yellowface” casting, unwittingly hires a White actor to play the Asian lead in his play.

The stage reading of David Henry Hwang's fast-paced provocative comedy takes place for one night only at the Market Hall on June 9.

Read more at Kawartha Now

“Tarzan: The Musical,” June 7 through 16

Praised by USA Today as a Broadway hit of "uncynical warmth and charm," the Tony-nominated Tarzan: The Musical swings into Moline's Spotlight Theatre for an area-debut run from June 7 through 16, this theatrical adaptation of Disney's Oscar-winning animated film boasting magical stagecraft and delightful tunes including "Two Worlds," "Strangers Like Me," and 1999's Academy Award champion ""You'll Be In My Heart."

With its book by Tony Award winner David Henry Hwang and music by the legendary Phil Collins, Tarzan: The Musical opens on the shores of West Africa, where a baby boy is orphaned when his shipwrecked parents become the victims of a fierce leopard. He is subsequently taken in and raised by a family of gorillas who have recently lost their own baby to the same predator. They name the child Tarzan, and he grows up as one of the pack. However, his foster father Kerchak remains wary of having a human in the jungle. When an expedition of human explorers and naturalists enter the jungle, Tarzan encounters creatures like himself for the first time. As he learns about human life and grows increasingly enamored of Jane, a young naturalist, Tarzan begins to realize that they are not so different. However, Tarzan and Jane’s relationship threatens the safety of the gorillas, and the couple must eventually decide where they truly belong.

Read more at River Cities’ Reader

David Henry Hwang's YELLOW FACE Announced At Lyric Stage Boston

An Asian-American playwright and activist gets tangled in a complicated and humorous web of lies as he struggles to win back his integrity.

Lyric Stage Boston closes out the 2024/25 season with David Henry Hwang's semi-autobiographical satirical comedy, Yellow Face. 

Truth and fiction blur in David Henry Hwang's satiric memoir about DHH, a playwright plunged into a whirlpool of missteps and unintentional hypocrisy after a vocal protest against the casting of Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian hustler in the Broadway production of Miss Saigon. What he condemns as “yellowface” soon comes back to haunt him when he later misidentifies a Caucasian actor for mixed-race and casts him in his own Broadway-bound comedy. His personal integrity is compromised as he proceeds to conceal his blunder aiding the narrative of this “born-again Asian.”. Ultimately a forceful argument for representation, this provocative and comical sideways glance at race and assimilation asks “who has the ownership of a culture?”

Read more at Broadway World

18 Times Asian and Asian Americans Made History on Broadway

Playbill celebrates Asian and Pacific American Heritage Month with a timeline of artistic milestones.

May is Asian and Pacific American Heritage Month. To celebrate that, Playbill has put together a timeline of all the times Asian and Asian Americans have made history on Broadway. 

But first, a caveat: Theatre history can be murky. So much of it went undocumented, especially the history of BIPOC artists on Broadway. Many artists in the beginning of the century did not openly identify as Black, Indigenous, or as a person of color, due to the negative impact it could have on their careers. That is why the history of who is "first" on Broadway can be unclear at best. 

1988
David Henry Hwang becomes the first Asian American playwright to be produced on Broadway with M. Butterfly. The show later goes on to win three Tony Awards, including Best Play, Best Direction (for John Dexter), and Best Featured Actor In A Play (for BD Wong). Hwang is the first Asian American playwright to win a Tony Award and Wong is the first Asian American actor to win a Tony.

Read more at Playbill

A new opera explores the death of a young soldier from Manhattan's Chinatown

The New York premiere of the opera "An American Soldier," based on the story of Pvt. Danny Chen, opens at the Perelman Performing Arts Center on Sunday.

Chen was born and raised in Manhattan’s Chinatown and joined the Army in 2011. His body was discovered with a self-inflicted gunshot wound on a U.S. base in Afghanistan later that year. A military investigation revealed that the 19 year-old had been subjected to brutal hazing and racist abuse by his fellow soldiers. A series of courts martial followed.

But "An American Soldier" isn't a simple retelling of the news. Playwright David Henry Hwang, best known for "M. Butterfly," felt the story was so unambiguous that it would not make for a good theater piece.

Read more at Gothamist

Opera commemorates the life and tragic death of Pvt. Danny Chen of NYC

LOWER MANHATTAN (WABC) -- If opera is an art that captures tragedy, then Army Private Danny Chen's story was made for this stage.

The 19-year-old soldier from Manhattan's Chinatown who was bullied into suicide by his own squad while on deployment in Afghanistan in 2011 was brutally hazed for being Chinese-American.

Composer Huang Ruo says Danny's story isn't only Danny's story, but the story of a community's struggle.

Read more at ABC 7

That Time David Cronenberg Remade ‘The Fly’ as an Opera (Yes, Really)

Sing me a tune, Brundlefly!

• The Fly represents the quintessential Cronenberg film, showcasing his thematic resonance and meticulous craft.

• The 2008 Fly opera blends elements from previous adaptations, offering a gruesome and vile stage rendition.

• The opera, a joint effort by Howard Shore, David Henry Hwang, and David Cronenberg, portrays Seth Brundle's transformation in a 1950s setting.

Just when we all thought that everyone's favorite barf bag maestro had shown all of his cards, he got back up and reinvented himself again. The year was 2008, a mere 22 years after Cronenberg's critically acclaimed remake of The Fly was released. Howard Shore, the composer behind the 1986 remake, and David Henry Hwang, a critically acclaimed play writer and screenwriter, took the tragedy of Seth Brundle on themselves, teleported its particles into outer space, and brought it back down as an opera. Just like he did 22 years before, Shore composed the music for this new version, with different compositions than before. Hwang, on the other hand, wrote the libretto.

Read more at Colider

David Henry Hwang on the New York premiere of "An American Soldier" at PAC NYC

Sarah LaDuke and David Henry Hwang

On October 3, 2011, Chinese-American Army Pvt. Danny Chen was found dead in a guard tower at his base in Afghanistan. The opera “An American Soldier” is based on his story and the ensuing courts-martial of Chen’s fellow soldiers.

“An American Solider” is having its New York City premiere at PAC NYC May 12-19 in a new 2024 version co-commissioned by PAC NYC and Boston Lyric Opera.

Composed by Huang Ruo, “An American Solider” features a libretto by our guest, David Henry Hwang.

Hwang’s work includes the plays ”M. Butterfly,” “Chinglish,” “Yellow Face,” “Golden Child,” “The Dance and the Railroad,” and “FOB,” as well as the Broadway musicals “Aida,” ”Flower Drum Song” and Disney’s “Tarzan.” His newest musical, “Soft Power,” written with composer Jeanine Tesori, opened in 2019 at New York’s Public Theatre, where it received four Outer Critics Honors, a 2021 Grammy Nomination, and was a Finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

Read more at WAMC

[SOLD OUT] Corky Lee's Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice

Discussions Begin at 6:30 Reception to follow at 8:30

Known throughout his lifetime as the “undisputed, unofficial Asian American photographer laureate,” the late photojournalist Corky Lee documented Asian American and Pacific Islander communities for fifty years, breaking the stereotype of Asian Americans as docile, passive, and, above all, foreign to this country. Corky Lee’s Asian America is a stunning retrospective of his life’s work — a selection of the best photographs from his vast collection, from his start in New York’s Chinatown in the 1970s to his coverage of diverse Asian American communities across the country until his untimely passing in 2021. 

Speakers include David Henry Hwang, a Tony- and Grammy-Award-winning writer for stage and screen, whose works include M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, Aida, FOB, and Soft Power ; Akemi Kochiyama, a Harlem-based community builder, writer, scholar-activist and co-director of the Yuri Kochiyama Solidarity Project.

Read more at the Asian Society

BARBICAN REVEALS 2024-25 SEASON

The Barbican has today announced the classical music programme for its upcoming for 2024-2025 season with performances by its resident, associate and partner ensembles as well as international guests.

On the opera stage, composer Rolf Hind presents his Sky in a Small Cage, created with Mahogany Opera, in September, while the BBCSO presents an operatic semi-staging of David Henry Hwang’s Broadway play M. Butterfly with music by Huang Ruo and libretto by Hwang and LOD muziektheater and Toneelhuis tell a story of resistance to colonial injustice in Ghana through Gorges Ocloo’s ‘Afropera’ The Golden Stool in October.

Read more at Classical Music UK

Q&A with David Henry Hwang, ’79, Tony-winning playwright and 2024 Rathbun lecturer at Stanford

David Henry Hwang (Image credit: Courtesy David Henry Hwang)

The career of acclaimed dramatist David Henry Hwang began as a Stanford student in the late 1970s.

“During my time at Stanford, I discovered what I wanted to do for my life’s work and who I am as an AAPI,” Hwang said.

Hwang, who won a Tony Award in 1988 for his play M. Butterfly, will return to campus on Friday, April 12, as the 2024 Rathbun Visiting Fellow to deliver the Rathbun Lecture on a Meaningful Life at Memorial Church at 6 p.m. A program that began in 2008, the lecture – which is open to the public – engages students and other members of the university community in conversations about their personal ethics, beliefs, and motivations.

Hwang’s works have spanned the stage, movies, opera, and television, often with themes of multiculturalism. A professor at the Columbia University School of the Arts, he is a three-time Tony nominee, a three-time OBIE winner, a Grammy winner, and a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama.

Read more at the Stanford Report

‘Yellow Face’, ‘English’ & Reimagined ‘The Pirates Of Penzance’ Set Broadway Openings

Daniel Dae Kim to star in David Henry Hwang's 'Yellow Face'

Photo by Tyler Mills

Roundabout Theatre Company has announced the dates for its 2024-25 season, with David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face starring Daniel Dae Kim kicking off the company’s Broadway line-up with an October 1 opening night.

Read more at Deadline

Roundabout Sets 2024–25 Season Opening Nights

The marquee of the newly renamed Todd Haimes Theatre Courtesy Roundabout Theatre Company

The season will feature two Broadway premieres, a Broadway musical revival, and two world premieres Off-Broadway.

Roundabout Theatre Company has set its official opening night dates for the five previously announcedshows in its 2024–25 Broadway and Off-Broadway season. 

David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face will open the season October 1 at the Todd Haimes Theatre. Daniel Dae Kim is set to star in the Broadway premiere of the farce, inspired by real events when Hwang mistakenly cast a white actor in the Asian lead of one of his plays. Leigh Silverman will direct.

Read more at Playbill 

David Henry Hwang’s 'Ainadamar' Featured in Met Opera’s 24-25 Season

The Metropolitan Opera recently announced their 2024-2025 season, a lineup which will include Theatre Professor David Henry Hwang’s opera Ainadamar. 

Composed by Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov with direction by Brazilian director and choreographer Deborah Colker, the Grammy Award-winning opera explores the storied life of gay Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, whose socialist politics and homosexuality led to his assassination by Fascist forces in 1936, at the start of the Spanish Civil War. 

Hwang's libretto explores Lorca's life story through the memories of Catalan actress Margarita Xirgu, who was Lorca’s muse, played by Angel Blue and Gabriella Reyes. Lorca is portrayed by Daniela Mac in a trouser role, and Alfredo Tejada plays the facilitator of Lorca’s assassination, Falangist politician Ramón Ruiz Alonso. 

Read more at Columbia University Arts

American Composers Orchestra & Perelman Performing Arts Center to Present ‘An American Soldier’

The American Composers Orchestra and Perelman Performing Arts Center are set to present the New York premiere of composer Huang Ruo and librettist David Henry Hwang’s “An American Soldier.”

The work is based on the true story of Chinese-American Army Pvt. Danny Chen, who was found dead in a guard tower at his base in Afghanistan in 2011 will be directed by Chay Yew, will star tenor Brian Vu as Danny Chen, mezzo-soprano Nina Yoshida Nelsen as his mother, soprano Hannah Cho as his school friend Josephine Young, and baritone Alex DeSocio as Sgt. Aaron Marcum, one of the soldiers charged in the investigation.

The cast is rounded out by Ben Brady, Cierra Byrd, James C. Harris, Shelén Hughes, Joshua Sanders, and Christian Simmons.

“An American Soldier” will be performed between May 12 and 19, 2024.

Read more at Opera Wire