Cambodian Rock Band
Tickets from $35 Buy Tickets
Cititour.com Review
“Cambodia is just a dark spot on the map,” says one of the primary characters in Lauren Yee’s “Cambodian Rock Band,” now making a long-overdue NYC premiere at the Pershing Square Signature Center. And while that statement is made in the play in 1978, its truthfulness remains just as strong 42 years later as most Americans still know little about the complicated history, culture and traditions of this Asian country.
Fortunately, Yee does a great deal -- quite successfully -- to remedy that fact in this work, although I can’t help but wish that she had done it somewhat more artfully and in a shorter length of time. (Chay Yew’s current production, which often feels bloated and self-indulgent, runs well over 2 ½ hours!)
As its title may suggest, we’re exposed during “Cambodian Rock Band” to a great deal of the country’s native music -- a mixture of ’60s-sounding surf music and slightly harder, guitar-heavy rock (all of which was recorded and/or written by the still-popular 21st-century group Dengue Fever, and played onstage by the show’s multi-talented cast). More importantly, we also learn about everything from Cambodia’s unusual “fish spas” to its most notorious 1970s prison, S21, a former high school that ended up being a notorious “killing field.”
Above all, though, we become enmeshed in a political-meets-personal story – albeit one that can often feel cliched and meandering, draining it (and the play) of its potential power. It begins with the unexpected return to Cambodia by Chum (Joe Ngo, purposely overdoing the dopey daddy bit in Act I) who makes a less-than-welcome surprise visit to his grown, American-born daughter Neary (Courtney Reed). She has spent the past two years in Cambodia helping to prosecute Duch (the brilliantly sinewy Francis Jue), a math teacher who rather unexpectedly became the Khmer Rouge’s head of S21 in the 1970s, overseeing the death of 20,000 men and women and children. (Unlike the other characters, Duch is based firmly on a real person.)
Chum has his reasons, some baldly stated and some badly hidden, for trying to extricate Neary from this situation. Still, the first act would be far more effective if so much of it wasn’t played in such a sitcom-like fashion, including having Neary’s boyfriend Ted (the handsome Moses Villarama) emerge half-naked from the bathroom just as Chum arrives. We also have to get through a lot of exposition, a couple of rather obvious twists, a whole lot of music, and the completely unnecessary presence of Duch as a quasi-narrator before we get to the show’s second half, which strikes us hard in our hearts and our souls.
It’s best to know little about what happens after intermission other than to the say that Yee beautifully expands the stories of the young Chum (wonderfully executed by Ngo), Duch, and Chum’s former bandmate Lang (also played by Villarama), who plays a surprisingly pivotal role in both men’s live. Oddly, though, Yee basically erases Neary, whom we’re led to believe may be the play’s main character, from the show’s canvas midway through the first act and it takes a shockingly long time for her to reappear.
Still, for all its shortcomings, “Cambodian Rock Band” shines a much-need light on this so-called “dark spot on the map,” its dark history and its potentially bright future.
By Brian Scott Lipton
Visit the Site
https://www.signaturetheatre.org
Cast
Francis Jue, Abraham Kim, Jane Lui, Joe Ngo, Courtney Reed, and Moses Villarama
Open/Close Dates
Opening 2/4/2020
Closing 3/22/2020
Theatre Info
Pershing Square Signature Center
480 West 42nd Street
New York, NY 10036
Map
Comments
Sign up for our newsletter !