King of the Yees (c) HanJie Chow
Theater: King of the Yees
At Signature Theatre
Lauren Yee’s plays have always had absurd and funny flights of fancy, like in her last play, Mother Russia, Russia was an actual character on stage. There are plenty of amusing asides going on in King of the Yees, an older play having its big Off-Broadway premiere, but what affected me most is the autobiographical part of her semi-autobiographical work. Like Lauren’s upbringing in San Francisco and her father’s proud involvement in the Yee Family Association, my family lived across the Bay in Oakland, where we were also part (tangentially) of the Wong Family Association (the butt of many of Yee’s jokes in the play). So, while I enjoyed the funny, the father-daughter relationship and the Chinese-ness of it all resonated more. The play starts in a very meta way in which we watch Lauren Yee (The Last Jedi’s Kelly Marie Tran) at a performance of King of the Yees, a two-hander about “Lauren Yee” (Maureen Sebastian) and her father “Larry” (David Shih) when the real Larry (Francis Jue) interrupts the play. From there, the play within the play stops while the play we’re watching is shot out of a cannon as Larry and his big personality take over the stage, taking questions from the audience, going through the history of the Yee family (including how and why the Association was created) and just making Lauren miserable as she tries to take back possession of her play. After another Yee, Leland (no relations), a real-life California state senator whom Larry supports, is arrested for corruption, Larry disappears and Lauren turns to her ancestors to help her find him.
King of the Yees (c) HanJie Chow
Everything in the play tickled me, and I found a lot of truth in the silliness, especially in the second half when Lauren is challenged with a quest, which the talented Tran, making her Off-Broadway debut, finally gets to let loose after ceding the stage to Jue in the first half. Jue, who won a Tony Award for playing another playwright’s father in David Henry Hwang’s Face Value, has played the part of Larry for a decade now in various theaters around the country, so he knows how to hold the audience in the palm of his hands, with sincerity, wit and pathos. The other three members of the company play the various other characters, and they provide ample support. Sebastian and Shih are fine as the actors in the play, although a lot of their banter about being Asian in show biz feels like filler. Accurate and truthful, but filler, nonetheless. The two get to show off more range in the other characters they portray, especially in the second half. Which leads me to the fifth actor in the cast, Jon Norman Schneider, who has slowly amassed an impressive Off-Broadway résumé filled with memorable performances, and in Yee, goes full throttle for his coterie of characters, including a mystical chiropractor and, not to spoil anything, but a character that could have strutted the runway in Cats: The Jellicle Ball. Director Joshua Kahan Brody’s is able to juggle the flights of fancy, Chinese traditions (including an impressive face-changer) and familiar family dramas to make King of the Yees a show not to be missed this fall.
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Machine Learning (c) Valerie Terranova
Theater: Machine Learning
At Manhattan Neighborhood Network
There’s a lot that Australian playwright Kate Vozella has put into her new play Machine Learning, including up-to-date issues revolving around the machine of the title, AI, that may become dated the way this technology keeps evolving each day. The setting, beautifully designed by Tyler Herald and warmly lit (in a synthetic way) by Christopher Wong, is a modern and sleek apartment stocked with plenty of alcohol. We are in the near future where two couples are being paid to spend a set amount of time together to be observed. The first to arrive is the married lesbian couple Lucia (Emma Ramos), a writer, and Willa (Michele Selene Ang), a teacher, and it is clear that a tragic event has happened in their lives that keeps each on edge, tiptoeing around what neither want to talk about. The second couple is Georgia (Delaney Rowe), a therapist, and Charlie (Douglas Smith, all puppy dog goofy), a sculptor, who don’t seem to be in love but infatuated enough to agree to this set up. The two couples do not get along at all, but as the days and weeks wear on, their goal is to continuously poke at each other (like in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf) to get the secret they are all carrying. All four actors have their strengths, and they add a lot of humor and raw intensity to each new situation that arises, but I have to single out Rowe. She reminds me of a young Demi Moore, especially her character in St. Elmo’s Fire. Her Georgia thinks of herself as strong but it also feels like a defense mechanism; she’s unpredictable and calculating to always get her way, but also vulnerable and relatable. Skillfully directed by Colm Summers, Machine Learning only falters when it gets back to Vozella’s central conceit of AI observing and learning. Like in real life, it’s the human connection that makes the drama effective. The rest, alas, feels artificial.
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Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen (c) Andy Henderson
Theater: Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen
At The Culture Club
The sudden and unexpected death of songwriter Duncan Sheik is especially tragic as 2026 would seem to be a sort of comeback year for the once one-hit wonder singer (“Barely Breathing” is still on my rotation) turned Tony Award-winning musical composer. Not only is there a revival of his biggest hit, Spring Awakening, on its way, but he was in rehearsals for his latest musical, Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen. Thankfully, in the capable hands of the talented director/choreographer Rob Ashford and the diverse and risk-taking cast, Memoirs has arrived in a production Sheik would be proud of. The show is proud to bill itself as the first musical to be based on a manga, and Memoirs centers around a discrete Paris brothel called The Night Egg in the early 1900s where the women are taken care of by the owner (Jenny Powers) and the clients get to play out their wildest fantasies (the one involving lambs will certainly divide audiences as to its audacity or disgust factor). The show soon focuses on the fate of the youngest and newest worker Colette (Sophia Anne Caruso), who is asked by one client, Sakae (Marc delaCruz), not for sex but for her to write down her thoughts in a book. Talk about kink.
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Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen (c) Andy Henderson
There’s not much actual plot in Lean Nanako Winkler’s script adaptation of the Moyoco Anno manga, that is, until we meet Colette’s lout of a boyfriend, Léon (Cory Jeacoma), who professes his love, but also needs money to pay off a gambling debt, which he in turn gives to another sex worker, the high-class Nana, played with no-nonsense confidence by Nkeki Obi-Melekwe. Léon gets the more upbeat songs by Sheik, which reminded me of the catchier moments of Sheik’s best show, “American Psycho,” while the rest of the songs have his signature poetic flourishes and moody melodies. Caruso, looking like a young Natalie Portman, holds her own as the lead, but the character’s turn from naïve to jaded doesn’t fully gel. The production is gorgeous with Scott Pask’s simple theater-in-the-round set with mirrors peppered throughout the audience, seemingly lit by candlelight by Brian Tovar, while the costumes by Catherine Zuber are always gorgeous, even at its most lascivious. There is a lot to admire and enjoy in this world premiere, but the musical ultimately feels a bit Sweet Charity and The Life here, some Cabaret and Gigi there, with not much of its own voice to put a fresh take on this familiar terrain.
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