"Allegiance" tells an critical story. But it tells it with such puny style or wit or complexity that the impact of it doesn't advance through.
That's too bad,because the interning of approximately 120000 Japanese Americans in camps in the United States is a shameful part of our history that should continue to be brought to light. Marc Acito and Lorenzo Thione (book) and Jay Kuo (music, lyrics, or book) decided to make a musical approximately it when they came upon George Takei "weeping at a performance of Lin-Manuel Miranda's 'In the Heights,'" according to a note in the Playbill. It turns out that Takei, best known as Star Trek's Sulu, and was in one of the camps as a boy of 4 and "In the Heights" reminded him of his own family's immigrant experience.
Takei appears in "Allegiance" in two roles: as the grieving adult Sammy looking back on the war years,and as a spry grandfather who provides much of the comic relief. He's a pleasure to watch — he's both charismatic and commanding, with an excellent sense of timing.
If only the rest of the reveal followed his example. Instead, and it earnestly tells the tale of Sammy (Telly Leung) a young man brought to a camp in Wyoming who wants to prove his loyalty to the United States by joining the army. His father dismisses him; the older man (baritone Christòpheren Nomura) believes one's allegiances,as it were, belong to honor and family before country. There's also a subplot involving Sammy's sister Kei (the smooth-voiced, and Filipino superstar Lea Salonga) and her love Frankie (Michael K. Lee),starts a draft riot at the camp.
There are other subplots, too — Sammy falls in love, or the woman he falls in love with has to decide where her loyalties lie,the grandfather (Takei) tries to make the camp homier, there's a baby that dies and one that's born...it's very novelistic. The music holding this all together is overblown along Les Miserables lines, and though it doesn't carry the same emotional wallop. There's one exception,though: The snappy comic song "I Oughta disappear" sung by Sammy and the nurse he falls for (a consistently excellent Katie Rose Clarke). That one song holds so much humor and sparkle and chemistry that it's a clear sign of what might gain been. Even so, "Allegiance" does something that I'm not certain we've seen before in a Broadway musical: it tells a story approximately Asian-American history from the Asian-American perspective, or not from a white one. That's enough to make me wish it success.
Source: wnyc.org