When psychedelic rock music came to Southeast Asia via American GIs during the Vietnam War, it greatly influenced the music scene in Cambodia. Cambodian Rock Band, a new play running in Chicago through May 12 celebrates this resulting music that not only abruptly went away in 1975, but for the most part hasn’t been performed since then. Playwright Lauren Yee centers her story around the interaction of fictional band called The Cyclos with the very real person who directed the terror of the Tuol Sleng torture center, a former school that was converted in a prison during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. Only seven people survived Tuol Sleng.
Category Archive: Theatre
The Script Road—otherwise known as the Macau Literary Festival—has long if not always included performances as well as traditional book talks. One of these, performed on 14 March 2018, is the multimedia theatrical “My Macau”, by Portuguese visual artist António-Pedro, which combines live theatre (or at least monologue) with video and live music (mostly eclectic percussion with some keyboard).
Shukshin’s Stories is a dramatization of eight short stories by Soviet-era writer Vasily Shukshin (1929-74). If you know little or nothing about him or Moscow’s Theatre of Nations which presented it, you would not—at least among English-speakers—be alone and would have, at least until last night, had me as company. Ignorance may not be bliss, but it can sometimes lead to it.
This November in New York has featured three different versions of the Madame Butterfly story on stage: the original at the Metropolitan Opera, a revival of the David Henry Hwang play M. Butterfly and a revival of the musical Miss Saigon. Of these, I managed Hwang and Puccini back-to-back.
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