“Tony Award ® winner and three-time Pulitzer finalist David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) will make his Roundabout debut with the Broadway premiere of Yellow Face, his hilarious is-he-or-isn’t-he comedy of identity, show business, and (perhaps) autobiography. Starring Daniel Dae Kim (Lost) and directed by Tony nominee Leigh Silverman (Violet).
In this play inspired by real events, the playwright’s fictionalized doppelgänger protests yellowface casting in Miss Saigon, only to mistakenly cast a white actor as the Asian lead in his own play. This Obie Award-winning and Pulitzer finalist play is a laugh-out-loud farce about the complexities of race.”
Hwang has given Yellow Face a minor face lift since the original New York production. It’s good work: Minus its intermission and a few inessential scenes, the play seems tauter and smoother, but not unnaturally so; its wrinkles and laugh lines remain. Kim, whose only previous Broadway experience was a brief stint in the King and I role originated by the non-Asian Yul Brynner, capably holds the show’s center as DHH, with an appealing layer of fluster behind his veneer of success. Three versatile actors—Marinda Anderson, Shannon Tyo and Some Like It Hot’s expert Kevin Del Aguila—fill out the many minor roles, often playing against ethnic type; these include quick, insider-y sketches of real-life journalists, activists, theater creators and (such as BD Wong, Margaret Cho and Jane Krakowski).
This closing cavalcade of gotchas somewhat dilutes the potency of what has gone before. But perhaps the real power Yellow Face proposes is of minority voices not just delivering sober-minded rebuttals to bigotry, but—in occupying spaces like a Broadway theater—offering those rebuttals with irreverent humor and pointed swagger while playing with audiences’ perceptions and expectations as freely as possible.
2007 | Off-Broadway |
Original Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
2024 | Broadway |
Roundabout Theatre Company Broadway Premiere Production Broadway |
Videos