Allegiance

Or: My country, right or wrong

If Allegiance has a principal virtue it is even handedness. A musical tackling the Japanese Internment during the Second World War its characters are allowed to pit their ideas against each other, elders verses youngsters, those who caution compliance with the government as a chance to show their loyalty vs those who passionately resist and stand up for their liberties.

Focusing on the story of the fictional Kimura family, the musical begins with the death of Kay (Lea Salonga) and passing through her executor an envelope and a fistful of memories to her estranged brother Sam (played as a youngster by Telly Leung, and in the present day by George Takei). We return to the internment the family and their neighbors in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Sammy wants to sign up to join the army and prove his allegiance while his sister wishes the already fractured family to stay together, while both stumble into ill-advised relationships: Sammy with Nurse Hannah Campbell (Katie Rose Clarke) and Kay with handsome dissident Frankie Suzuki (Micheal K. Lee).

Composed and overseen by Jay Kuo, Allegiance is slow to start, tripping over itself to get the players in place and justify its two tone note of sober outrage and broadway optimism. It doesn’t hit that note until the big “dance at the gym” number “Paradise” and it only starts to create in the act one finale and act two kick off “Our Time Now” and “Resist.” The majority of the second act, save for one intentionally brown note song from the squeaky clean white boys, rumbles on with force, and manages to cram in large bites history: from the forming of the 442nd Regiment, to the efforts (some might say misguided or even harmful efforts) of lobbyist Mike Masaoka (Greg Wanatabe), to the heart mountain draft resisters, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The humor is very well drawn, both from the blessedly quick ensemble to the Takei’s antics in his double role as Ojii-San. Lee excels both as as an earnest wit and a strong voiced singer, a good match for the Salonga’s sweet apple of a voice.

The creative team has twisted circumstances somewhat to increase dramatic effect, sugar and spicing the camps acts of resistance and overlooking that so much of the evil of the internment (outside the brutal arrests and the nightmare of Tule Lake) lay in its banality. There was no need for drawn guns to be accidentally fired into protagonists, or for resistance members to be run to ground. Why should they be taken seriously. They were already in prison after all, and the rest of the country was hard pressed to care. There was a war on. It may lend itself more towards the “musical” than a “historical” side; but it is being told.