Allegiance (play)

As the play begins on December 7, 2001, an elderly Japanese American dons an army uniform. A knock at the door reveals a messenger who informs him that his sister, Kei, has passed away and has left him an envelope. He tells her that he hasn't seen her for fifty years. But he hears her talking to him, sending him back in time to just prior to the war. The man, Sam Kimura, has just returned to the family farm in Salinas, California, after having graduated from college. He is warmly greeted by his older sister Kei and less warmly by his father Tatsuo, whom he feels is overly demanding of him. (His mother had died giving birth to him, so Kei had played a large role in raising him.) The fourth member of the family is his paternal grandfather, a whimsical old man whom everyone just calls "Ojii-chan." Their happy life is soon overturned after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The family is forced to sell their farm and possessions for a pittance and are sent to the Heart Mountain, Wyoming, concentration camp. The real historical figure Mike Masaoka appears periodically from this point, providing explanations of the historical events and his perspective on what should be done, sometimes in conversation with a white Washington, D.C. official.

At Heart Mountain, Sam takes a leadership role and tries to rally the community to make the best of a bad situation. He also enters into a romance with a white nurse named Hannah Campbell. Meanwhile, Kei meets a young law student named Frankie Suzuki who is more cynical and takes a dim view of Sam's efforts. The loyalty questionnaire episode splits the family as Tatsuo angrily answers Questions 27 and 28 no and no; he is taken away by the military police in handcuffs and sent to Tule Lake . Over his father's and Kei's objections, Sam volunteers for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team . When Nisei eligibility for the draft is restored and Frankie's number comes up, he leads a movement to resist the draft , refusing to report until his and his family's freedoms are restored. He is taken away by military police and beaten. Having promised Sam that she would look after Kei, Hannah arranges for Frankie to be brought to her for medical attention. But when he antagonizes the MP guarding him, the MP attempts to shoot him, but accidentally shoots and kills Hannah instead. In the meantime, Sam becomes a war hero and is wounded in the rescue of the "Lost Battalion." Ojii-chan dies in his garden at Heart Mountain. At war's end, Frankie, now out of prison, marries Kei and they have a daughter, named Hanako after Hannah, and find a home in San Francisco with Kei's father. When Sam comes to visit, he is stunned to find that Kei has married the "traitor" Frankie and blames Frankie for Hannah's death. He breaks ties with the rest of the family. Back in the present, the elderly Sam opens the envelope to find a copy of a magazine on which he was on the cover that his father had saved all these years, having written that Sam was his hero. Sam realizes how much his father had really loved him. He goes to Kei's funeral; the now grown up Hanako introduces herself and they tearfully embrace.

The play began with a chance encounter in 2008 when Takei and his husband Brad Takei found themselves sitting right behind composer Kuo and writer/producer Thione at a Broadway performance of Forbidden Broadway and again the very next night at a performance of In the Heights . Noticing how moved Takei had been during a song about a father at the latter, conversation turned to Takei's father and his wartime experiences, which eventually led to talk about doing a play based on the wartime incarceration story. The first staged reading of Allegiance took place in July 2009 at the Japanese American National Museum . Having recruited Tony Award-winning star Lea Salonga, a July 2011 workshop in New York took place as a precursor to the play's premiere at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego on September 19, 2012. The Old Globe engagement was abetted by Takei's use of social media to drum up support for the play, including an IndieGoGo.com campaign that raised $158,322 from 5,276 backers, over three times the initial goal. ^[1]

The San Diego engagement proved a success. Allegiance became the "the most financially successful production in that regional theatre's history" and drew largely positive reviews. The producers sought out additional investors in so that the play could be brought to Broadway. ^[2]

At the same time, some Japanese Americans raised concerns about the content of the play. Even before the San Diego engagement, a group of JACL members from the Sacramento area calling themselves "Concerned Supporters of 'Allegiance'" objected to the "negative portrayal of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and Mike Masaoka" and saw some aspects of the show as "insulting to the sacrifices made by the veterans." Gerald Yamada, president of the Japanese American Veterans Association, expressed similar concerns, noting that "the play gives the false impression to the American public that the evacuation and unjust imprisonment of persons of Japanese ancestry would not have happened but for the aid provided by JACL and Mike Masaoka," further noting that no mention in the play is made of the actual architects of the forced removal such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt or Lt. Gen. John DeWitt . ^[3]

The play had already evolved significantly. At the 2011 workshop, the family's name was "Omura," the father was a store owner, and there was an older son, James, who was the one who volunteered for the 442nd. The Salonga character, "Gloria Suzuki," was not related to the Omuras/Kimuras and was Sam's Japanese language teacher. Takei's older Sam remained a presence looking back on his younger self throughout the wartime scenes. Theater scholar Emilly Colborn-Roxworthy calls the Takei's new role as "Ojii-san," "a gently comedic, nonthreatening grandfather figure who speaks in stereotypically broken English and magically evades the trauma of the government's actual treatment of male Japanese elders at this time." In comparison to the San Diego version, Colborn-Roxworthy writes that the 2011 workshop version demonstrated "a daring will to confront primarily white theatre audiences with an unsympathetic portrait of a 'white chorus' that enacts racial violence against Japanese Americans in the alienating musical number 'A Jap Is a Jap,'" a number absent from subsequent versions. ^[4]

Perhaps in reaction to Japanese American and mainstream critics, the Broadway version further evolved from the San Diego version. Whereas the earlier version had the Mike Masaoka character sing and dance, including a number titled "Better Americans in a Greater America"—a portrayal that led Los Angeles Times critic Anne Marie Welsh to call his portrayal "caricatured"—the newer version has Masaoka as a sober and less obviously villainous figure who speaks many of the real Masaoka's actual words. The other major change is in the ending. In the earlier version, the envelope that Sam is bequeathed from Kei contains documents that supposedly expose the cynical roots of the 442nd, leading Sam to conclude that he had been "duped" into military service. In the later version, the envelope contains family documents that lead Sam to conclude that his father had loved him all along. The resolution goes from the political to the personal/familial. ^[5]

Allegiance opened on Broadway on November 8, 2015, at the Longacre Theater after previews beginning on October 6. It ended its run on February 14, 2016, after 37 previews and 111 regular performances. In total, it sold 113,152 seats, 72.37% of capacity, and had total grosses of $8,614,614. ^[6]

Response from both mainstream critics and the Japanese American community was mixed. Both Charles Isherwood in the New York Times and Jesse Green in New York Magazine found the play too didactic, with the former writing that it "often feels more like a history lesson than a musical," and the latter calling it "earnest and turgid." In USA Today , Elysa Gardner called it "... as corny as Kansas in August and as obvious as Lady Gaga on a red carpet," but added, "But darned if it won't get a grip on your heartstrings." Linda Winer writes in Newsday that she "was engrossed throughout," adding that Allegiance "has fully developed characters, a strong cast and a new story to tell in an old-fashioned way." In Broadwayworld.com's compilation of reviews, it assigned Allegiance' an average critic rating of 6.81 out of 10 and an average reader rating of 8.27 out of 10. ^[7]

Japanese American community response was also mixed. Influential blogger Gil Asakawa writes that "'Allegiance' accomplishes Takei's goal with Broadway grandeur that matches any hit musical, with songs that soar and tug at heartstrings, tight choreography and a storyline that is familiar to many Japanese Americans, but not to the public at large," while playwright and actor Lane Nishikawa praised it for "overcoming the fiasco of 'yellowface' and 'racebending.'" While the JACL issued a statement saying that it was "disturbed by the play's use of the names of the Japanese American Citizens League and of Mike Masaoka," former JACL executive director Floyd Mori wrote that while it "has its flaws in telling the exact history,... the messages of the play are important for all to hear and to benefit from its lessons of betrayal by our own government." ^[8]

Issues with historical accuracy rankled some reviewers. In the Pacific Citizen , Matthew Ormseth writes that "... a greater faithfulness to the true conditions of the camps should have been observed, even at the expense of theatrical effect." Filmmaker and journalist Frank Abe, the most vocal Japanese American critic of the play, has criticized the exaggerated portrayal of conditions at Heart Mountain, writing that "... the makers of 'Allegiance' selectively alter the reality governing Heart Mountain to more closely suggest that of a German POW camp." Abe concludes: "It's not a question of insisting that art be slavishly accurate; dramatists must have leeway to condense and rearrange to arrive at an emotional truth. 'Allegiance' is bad art that sacrifices truth for theatricality. It arises less from an authentic sensibility, and more as the product of market research, calibrated for fame, box office, and Tony nods." ^[9]

In December 2016, a filmed version of a performance of Allegiance , with an introduction by Takei, played in movie theaters across the country in a special one-day engagement. It was shown again on the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 2017. The film version screened again in theaters in December 2018, along with a new documentary, Allegiance to Broadway: The Dream, The Story, The Journey of a Musical by filmmaker Greg Vander Veer. ^[10]

A new production of Allegiance was mounted in Los Angeles, running from February 21 to April 1, 2018 at the Aratani Theater in Little Tokyo. Co-produced by East West Players and the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, it was directed by Snehal Desai and choreographed by Rumi Oyama. While Takei reprised his role from prior productions, most of the rest of cast was new, including Ethan Le Phone as young Sammy, Elena Wang (who was Lea Salonga's understudy on Broadway) as Kei, and Eymard Cabling as Frankie. ^[11]

In 2023, the play—now named George Takei's Allegiance —had an Off West End production at the Charing Cross Theatre from January 7 to April 8. Takei and Leung reprised their Broadway roles, while Aynrand Ferrer played Kei and Patrick Munday played Frankie. The London production was directed and choreographed by Tara Overfield Wilkinson. ^[12]

Official website: http://www.allegiancemusical.com/ .

Asakawa, Gil. " George Takei's 'Allegiance' Is a Timely Historical Musical for Today. " Nikkei View: The Asian American Blog, Dec. 7, 2015.

Colborn-Roxworthy, Emily. "Revitalizing Japanese American Internment: Critical Empathy and Role-Play in the Musical Allegiance and the Video Game Drama in the Delta." Theatre Journal 66.1 (March 2014): 93–115.

Muranaka, Gwen. " 'Allegiance' and the Persistence of Little Tokyo ." Rafu Shimpo , Mar. 29, 2018.