A CurtainUp Review: Golden Child (Broadway)

Back to the main page of CurtainUp
The Internet Magazine Of Theater Reviews and Theater-Related Features http://www.curtainup.com

A CurtainUp Review
Golden Child On Broadway

A Mini-Collage Review

For our review of the original production see go here

David Henry Hwang’s Golden Child won an OBIE after its run at the Public Theater seventeen months ago despite decidedly mixed reviews. CurtainUp's review came in on the thumbs up side. Most of the negative comments related to the awkwardness of the opening and closing scenes set in contemporary New York.

In the interim the play followed the unusual path of recasting and rewriting during a series of out-of-town tryouts (including a very well-received run in Singapore). Now the play has returned to New York for a Broadway run.

While a play can be improved, there can also be so much diddling around either make things worse or prove the game of rewriting to be hardly worth the candle. Fortunately the main strengths of the original are intact in the current production so that we can keep our original review as the official one:

The play still focuses on the flashback to China, circa 1918 and the conflict between tradition and change as depicted through one man's family.
The actors who made the strongest contribution to the play's pleasures, have reprised their roles in this production -- Tsai Chin as the first and most dramatically important of the three wives and Julyana Soelistyo in her dual role as the play's title character and as the narrator Andrew's grandmother.
Director James Lapine continues at the helm and the physical production is beautiful as ever with the same set, lighting and costume designers in place.

Alas, all the rewriting -- making the narrator older, having grandmother appear in a dream instead of as a vision in a taxicab -- has done little to dispel the quibbles that sent Mr. Hwang back to his computer keyboard to begin with. The general concensus seems even more mixed than for the original Off-Broadway production:

Matt Wolf of Variety wrote "The burden of ancestry may be one of many provocative concerns in David Henry Hwang’s Golden Child, but such issues ultimately pale next to a more immediate obligation — to be dramatic — that the play just does not meet." About the re-configured modern day beginning he stated: "If anything, the first act, in particular, suggests a dramatist softening his approach, lest an audience be put off by what is, at heart, an Asian-American variant on the African-American debates that have long fueled the work of August Wilson — a grappling with ancestral ghosts among them."
Peter Marks of The New York Times also damned the rewrite with faint praise, writing that "Hwang replaced some of the awkward plot devices, clarified his central ideas and made the piece more active." He concluded, however, that the play "is unable to buff its dull finish successfully."
Linda Winer of Newsday thought the beginning/end revisions an improvement but still found them less captivating than the rest of the play which she generally liked as much as we did
Clive Barnes of The Post found the revision "more polished and truly rewarding" but thought the beginning and end didn't work now any more than it did originally.

Like so many writers of a first-time-around-the-block super hit, Hwang's biggest problem in winning critical support is not whether the Broadway version is better than the Off-Broadway one, but whether whatever he does can measure up to the slam-bang dramatic impact of M. Butterfly. By having grandma pop up in a dream instead of the original taxicab, he now has given himself another burden of having his dream compared to Teyve's sleep visit to his ancestors in Fiddler on the Roof.

In the final analysis, this new Golden Child may well find enough of an audience to enjoy a substantial Broadway run, not so much in spite of the so-so critical reception but because this seems to be a season for a heartening receptivity to dramas.

For our review of the original production see go here

GOLDEN CHILD
Written by David Henry Hwang
Directed by James Lapine
With: (bold-faced names represent reprise-performances from the production at the Public Theater): Randall Duk Kim (Eng Tieng-Bin), Tsai Chin (Eng Siu-Yong), Ming-Na Wen (Eng Eling), John Horton (Reverend Anthony Baines), Julyana Soelistyo ( Ma and Eng Ahn), Kim Miyori ( Eng Luan); also: Lisa Li, James Saito, Julienne Hanzelka Kim.
Sets: Tony Straiges
Costumes: Martin Pakledinaz
Lighting, David J. Lander
Sound: Dan Moses Schreier
Longacre,220 W. 48th St. (212/239-6200)
Performances begin 3/14/98; openingOpened 4/02/98
Despite a Tony nomination as Best Play of 1998, David Henry Hwang's Golden Child, closed May 31 after its 69th performance.

Information from this site may not be reproduced in print or online without specific permission from esommer@pipeline.com

A CurtainUp Review Golden Child On Broadway

A Mini-Collage Review

A CurtainUp Review
Golden Child On Broadway