ON THIS SIDE OF THE WORLD

The performances are sparkling, the melodies are tuneful, and the show’s heart is in the right place, but without a plot, dialog, or interconnected characters to keep an audience spellbound, a nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time is much too long for a song cycle like Paulo K Tiról and Noam Shapiro’s On This Side Of The World.

The East West Players World Premiere’s intentions are certainly laudable, to shine a light on Filipinos either heading towards or already living an immigrant life in the United States.

And the genre which its creators have opted for is one that has worked for such songwriters as Jason Robert Brown, William Finn, and Maltby & Shire, whose collections of thematically related but otherwise stand-alone songs have made Songs For A New World, Elegies, and Closer Than Ever regional theater favorites.

Like those titles, On The Other Side Of The World is a song cycle (and not as it’s being billed an actual musical), meaning that every single time a new song gets introduced, it is performed by someone we’re meeting for the first time, and with a whopping twenty-four characters and twenty songs in all, audience member must push the reset button each time a new one gets sung, with no time in between to let the melodies sink in.

That’s a lot to take in, and for this reviewer at least, it ends up being too much. At ninety-minutes, On This Side Of The World might work as well as the previously mentioned song cycles do. At nearly an hour longer (factoring in intermission), it overstays its welcome.

There’s no denying Tiról’s talents as a songwriter, or co-creator Shapiro’s as director, and the production’s cast of Filipino-American triple-threats—Steven-Adam Agdeppa, Zandi De Jesus, Michael C. Palma, Cassie Simone, Andrea Somera, and Shaun Tuazon–are as crème-de-la-crème as triple-threat casts get.

Not only that, but since the sensational sextet get to portray three, four, or even five characters each, that adds up to a lot of shape-shifting, and it’s something these gifted actor-singer-dancers do to dazzling effect in roles as diverse as a nanny caring for a child whose well-to-do mom is too busy to care for herself, a flamboyantly garbed gay man who finds himself the target of rice queen lust, gossipy Aunties for whom Sunday mass is the perfect time and place to gossip, and more, many, many, many more.

Still, hard as it might be for its creators to cut any of them, what On This Side Of The World needs most is for five or six of its songs to be left on the cutting room floor.

What need not change even the slightest is the spectacular production design that On The Side Of The World has been given by East West Players.

Yi-Chien Le’s multilevel set features downstairs doors and upstairs windows that do double duty as screens for David Murakami’s gorgeous projections, transforming the stage from church to classroom to nightclub to airplane interior as passengers fly through stormy and sunny skies, the progress of their New York-bound flight charted above them.

Choreographer Allen Lucky Weaver provides plenty of ingenious footwork along the route as characters sport Jaymee Ngernwichit’s ravishing array of costumes.

Add to this Glenn Michael Baker’s magical multitude of props and Szu-Yun Wang’s stunning lighting design, and you have the kind of production design most World Premieres can only dream of.

Last but not least, Jennifer Lin and Marc Macalintal’s music direction is every bit as impeccable as Maddi Deckard’s crystal-clear sound design, Ian Miller’s orchestrations, and the show’s pitch-perfect live band*.

Melvin Biteng and Justine Rafael are understudies.

On This Side of the World is produced in association with FilAm ARTS. Edward Khris Fernandez is stage manager and Mikayla Bettner is assistant stage manager.

There is much to cheer about in East West Players’ latest, and for immigrants and children of immigrants in the audience, the individual stories it tells will ring particularly true. I just wish there weren’t quite so many of them, because with a more compact running time, On The Other Side Of The World might possibly match the success of the hit song cycles that have preceded it.

*Khris Kempis, Macalintal, Vincent Reyes, Christopher Spilsbury, and Rebecca Yeh

East West Players, David Henry Hwang Theatre, 120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles. Through June 10. Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays at 8:00. Saturdays at 2:00 and 8:00. Sundays at 5:00.
www.eastwestplayers.org

–Steven Stanley
May 14, 2023
Photos: Jenny Graham

 

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