Diverse offerings on O'ahu's stages

By Derek Paiva
Advertiser Staff Writer

Honolulu theatergoers rarely get as diverse a mix of locally produced stage productions to choose from as this week's collection of war-torn interracial romances, divorcing sixtysomethings, fractured global fables, James Joyce musicals and "Titan A.E."-inspired journeys of the soul.

Please try to find some time in between for a decent dinner and a good night's sleep.

'Sayonara,' the musical

War is hell. And sometimes, so is bringing it to the stage.

Composer George Fischoff pounded on the doors of theater producers for more than two decades trying to drum up interest in a musical version of James Michener's 1954 Korean War-era potboiler "Sayonara," with precious little interest to show for it.

Less influenced by the 1957 big screen, Oscar-winning drama method-mumbled by Marlon Brando than Michener's original, somewhat pulpy, tome, Fischoff viewed the interwoven stories of three U.S. military officers stationed in occupied Japan who fall in love with Japanese women — defying military rules forbidding fraternization with civilians — as timeless romances for the ages. Producers, on the other hand, saw Fischoff's musical idea, set against the backdrop of the Korean conflict, as hopelessly dated for '70s and '80s theater audiences grooving to rock musicals such as "Cats" and its Lloyd Webber-ish ilk.

Fischoff nonetheless trudged on with composing the music, enlisting a book adaptation by William Luce and lyrics by Hy Gilbert.

Finally given its shot on the Way Off Broadway stage — New Jersey, to be exact — in 1987, "Sayonara" survives today mainly through the good graces of the countless regional community theaters continually staging the musical to appreciative, though largely unfamiliar, audiences. All while Fischoff patiently awaits its still-possible ascent to the Broadway stage.

"The music is not Rodgers and Hammerstein, nor do I think it was intended to be," said Glenn Cannon, directing the musical for Army Community Theatre. "I don't think it's music that will have audiences whistling tunes when leaving the theater, but in terms of furthering the story and touching people emotionally, I think the music works quite well."

A fan of "Sayonara's" filmed version — which strangely featured the decidedly non-Asian Ricardo Montalban as a Japanese kabuki actor named Nakamura — Cannon, upon being asked to direct, remembered thinking, "They turned 'Sayonara' into a musical?"

Still, "it's a marvelous love story," said Cannon. "And one in which there is also extraordinary conflict, which is at the heart of all good playwrighting. That's what makes it work."

In "The Wash," autocratic Nobu (Allan Okubo) begins dating Kiyoko (Sue Nada) after his wife leaves him. Brad Goda

San Francisco-based playwright Philip Kan Gotanda has created one of the most subtly crafted and richly textured collections of stage works chronicling the post-World-War-II Japanese American experience.

In recent years, Honolulu audiences have flocked to local productions of Gotanda's "Yankee Dawg You Die" and "Sisters Matsumoto," the latter prompting an extended run of performances at Manoa Valley Theatre last November. Fondly remembering a late 1980s reading of a Gotanda script called "The Wash," director Lyn Kajiwara Ackerman eagerly accepted MVT producing director Dwight Martin's invitation earlier this year to helm the tenderly funny drama for the theater.

"It reminded me of a Japanese block print," Kajiwara Ackerman recalled of "The Wash" script. "It just had that feel. A sort of quietude and simplicity and beauty and strength in its storyline."

"The Wash" revolves around Nobu and Masi Matsumoto, both in their 60s, whose 40-year marriage ends abruptly when the long-suffering Masi decides to leave. Accustomed to his wife's servitude and virtually unable and unwilling to take care of himself, Nobu selfishly exerts some control over Masi's life by having her pick up his dirty clothes each week and returning them laundered and folded, which she does out of dutifulness.

One of their daughters, Marsha, wants to reunite them. Another daughter, Judy, supports her mother's newfound freedom. Meanwhile, Nobu and Masi learn to cope with being single and senior to both humorous and dramatic consequence.

"When I first read 'The Wash' years ago, I identified largely with Masi, who keeps coming back to do the wash and wonders why she keeps doing it," Kajiwara Ackerman said of the play, which was turned into a 1988 film for PBS' "American Playhouse," starring Mako and Nobu McCarthy. "But when I picked it up again this year, I found it to be more Nobu's story, and the fact that there are things he cannot come to grips with."

In staging the play, Kajiwara Ackerman attempted to highlight qualities in the brooding, at times cruel, Nobu, that audiences could sympathize with.

"Nobu is proud and stubborn in that real samurai 'I-am-the-man-and-this-is-my-place' kind of way," said Kajiwara Ackerman. "I wanted the audience to sense what in his makeup makes him the way he is."

Ravana (jointly played by, from left, Michelle Coats, Chucky Underwood and Jaime Unciano) plots to steal Sita from Rama in "The Monkey Bridge," part of "World Blend: Tales from the Planet's Depth." Leeward Community College Theatre

If nothing else eventually sells you on or keeps you far away from Leeward Community College Drama Department's stage compendium of eons-old fables from around the globe "World Blend: Tales from the Planet's Depth," it'll be the production's inspired take on "Little Red Riding Hood."

"We're doing it as a 1970s kind of porno fantasy," said director and LCC drama professor Paul Cravath, rather salaciously, describing a reimagined Red Riding 'hood bedecked in music and costumes straight out of "Shaft"-era Hollywood filmmaking. "We use the soundtrack from 'Debbie Does Dallas.' I don't think anybody will realize that detail, but they will recognize it as 1970s music."

Um, OK. But does it all fit?

"Oh, it just fits like a hand in a glove," laughed Cravath. "We're not just gratuitously changing the tradition. We take the story and look at it in the modern vernacular and metaphor. I think we definitely remain loyal to the story."

That is, if the wolf reimagined by playwrights and former Cravath students Garrick Paikai, Phillip Bullington and Mike Mariani as something of a Huggy Bear-like pimp character, and the extra layer of interpretation newly added to the line, "Grandma, what big eyes you have!" are your idea of staying true to the Mother Goose version.

"None of this is extreme in any way," assured Cravath, of the entire "World Blend" production. "But it's definitely adult material." He recommended keeping children 13 and under safely at home in the company of "Shrek."

Also included among "World Blend's" intriguing cosmic menu of seven flat-out comedy and serious dramas are a mafia-inspired take on the German tale of "The Dancing Princesses," and a "Matrix"-infused reinterpretation of "The Monkey Bridge" from India's beloved epic poem "The Ramayana." The production is actually a "best of" collection of original adaptations performed in LCC Lab Theatre drama workshops over the past couple of years. Cravath admitted that reinterpreting "World Blend's" classics both orally and visually with a nod toward the tastes of modern audiences was only part of his motivation for the completed brew.

"My first goal for the drama program here is putting as many students on the stage as possible," said Cravath. "The next thing was making sure what we did was entertaining and thought provoking."

Mission accomplished, we're guessing.

From left, Katie Leiva, Sharon Adair, Alan Sutterfield and Eden-Lee Murray in the musical production of "The Dead," based on a James Joyce story of a Dublin Christmas party, at HPU Theatre. Hawai'i Pacific University Theatre

The thought of blending the college lit-ready prose of James Joyce with the assembly-line mechanics of your average Broadway musical sounds at first like a task akin to mixing Beluga with Baskin-Robbins.

In other words, something you just don't do.

Undaunted by such literary snobbery, writers Richard Nelson and Shaun Davey several years back began crafting the outline for a musical production of Joyce's acclaimed short story "The Dead," which had already been fashioned into a somewhat torpid though critically praised drama by the late film director John Huston in 1987.

Writing with the suspicion that Joyce's richly nuanced story of the comings and goings, chatty conversations and poignant reminiscences at a sumptuous Christmas party annually hosted by a trio of women actually read like a literate musical composition, Nelson and Davey composed songs that matched the mood of guests at the gathering as well as "The Dead's" early 1900s Dublin setting.

"It's the kind of Irish folk music that would be similar to the style of music these people would be singing and dancing to at the turn of the century," said Joyce Maltby, who is helming Hawai'i Pacific University Theatre's production of "The Dead" through Dec. 9. "The music is very natural to it since the story is about their music."

Bowing to a limited 80-performance Broadway engagement in January 2000 with a cast including Christopher Walken, Blair Brown and Marni Nixon, "The Dead" garnered six Tony Award nominations, winning for Best Book of a Musical.

"It's got a lot of humor in it and is reflective of people being how they are at gatherings," said Maltby, explaining her affection for the musical and its original text. "There are all kinds of wonderful things about human nature in it, and it's not as heavy as one might imagine with a title like 'The Dead.' It's really about enjoying being with each other in the present."

Closer to then-twentysomething writer Joyce's sunnier original text than the terminally ill Huston's darker and heavier final film, "The Dead" as musical, said Maltby, provides an excellent first gulp of eggnog for the upcoming holiday season.

"I'd like the audience to feel like they're peeking in the windows at a Christmas party in Dublin in 1904," said Maltby.

'Karmic Slave'

The idea for Honolulu actor/playwright Thomas Isao Morinaka's daring stage production "Karmic Slave: Trapped on the Wheel of Reincarnation" came while listening to music from the failed animated feature "Titan A.E." on his car stereo.

"There was this song called 'Karma Slave' that talked about karma and progressing along the karmic cycle," said Morinaka. "How in one life you're a slave and in another life you're a king."

Morinaka immediately began crafting a deeper, more imagined stage study of a soul's journey through linear time on the way to Nirvana, and the incarnations — human or otherwise — the soul occupied on its journey.

In selecting the incarnations, "I wanted to cover a broad range of religions and social backgrounds from different time periods," said Morinaka. "I also wanted to go as much across the world as I could." The 13 button-pushing choices for Morinaka's shared soul include a pre-historic woman, Joan of Arc, a 16th-century samurai warrior, Adolf Hitler, Jesus Christ and a potted flower.

"Ultimately, you would think that if a soul does evil in a previous life, then it would get punished in the next one," explained Morinaka of his incarnation choices. "But that doesn't always happen. I'm trying to show in the progression of the soul's incarnations that there is no real defined right or wrong. No one really knows what karma determines."

Which adds up to a night tailor-made for adventurous theatergoers, as Morinaka describes the journey largely through character actions, music choices, use of color, but very little spoken script. Joan of Arc pitches a fit to a thumping techno track titled "Over My Head" before finding inner strength to lead the masses. Hitler is revealed performing an altogether mundane daily task common to half the human population.

"Karmic Slave" plot points — such as Morinaka's imagined transporting of the same soul through incarnations as universally bookended on the human scale of good and evil as Christ and Hitler — could lead to some vehement audience reaction come Late Night Theatre's traditional Friday post-show rap, but the playwright is ready for it.

"I'm expecting a whole lot of questions, which is good because my main goal is not necessarily to convey my personal message, but to stimulate the viewer into thinking about things," said Morinaka. "I definitely want to challenge the thoughts of the viewer."