Soft Power | |
---|---|
Music | Jeanine Tesori |
Lyrics | David Henry Hwang Jeanine Tesori (additional lyrics) |
Book | David Henry Hwang |
Premiere | May 3, 2018Ahmanson Theatre, Los Angeles : |
Productions | 2018 Los Angeles 2018 San Francisco 2019 Off-Broadway |
Soft Power is a musical (also referred to by its authors as a "play with a musical"[1]) with book and lyrics by David Henry Hwang[2] and music and additional lyrics by Jeanine Tesori.
Soft Power was intended as a "reverse The King And I". Instead of exoticizing an Asian country, Soft Power exoticizes America by looking at it from a hypothetical future Chinese musical. It also serves as a quasi-sequel to Hwang's 2007 play Yellow Face. Like that play, the semi-autobiographical work centers around a stand-in for the author named DHH interacting with fictional characters. [3] The play was partially inspired by an incident in 2015, where Hwang was stabbed by a stranger on the streets of New York.
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