A Return to China’s Tumultuous Spring

The marquee outside Little Tokyo’s Union Center for the Arts, home of East West Players, reads like this:

World Premiere

Beijing Spring

A Musical About Tiananmen

Huh? What? A tuner about the 1989 Chinese pro-democracy movement, its massive student concentration in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and the bloody aftermath of the government’s military solution?

Stranger shows have happened. (That’s the thing about musical theater: It’s a magnet for nervy improbability.) Against the odds, flaws and limitations notwithstanding, “Beijing Spring” is likely to hand a popular success to East West producing artistic director Tim Dang, co-director and lyricist of “Beijing Spring.”

You can take the musical, essentially a bookless song cycle, as a showcase for promising songwriting talent. Or you can take it as a showcase for musical theater voices, some very good ones, wherein the promise has already been fulfilled.

The best thing about the score, by composer Joel Iwataki and lyricist Dang, is its resistance to the anthemic, rock-’em-sock-’em power ballad. To be sure, the show has a couple, notably the climactic “Remembrance,” wailed but good by Randall Guiaya. It’s a lament for the “brief and shining moment” of freedom tasted by those who erected a tent city in Tiananmen Square. Thankfully, though, the score’s not always in attack mode, in that Frank Wildhorn “Civil War”-like fashion.

Dang and Iwataki establish a workable enough through-line for their small-scale pop-opera purposes. A university student (Michael K. Lee) detects the winds of change, and soon he’s handing out pamphlets, organizing, pushing for “the movement” to take its next step. Back home, his father (Paul Wong) is supportive, though cautiously so. He remembers, bittersweetly, his own revolutionary fervor, as does the student’s grandfather (Alvin Ing, who also plays Deng Xiaoping).

Portrayed by Ai Goeku, the son’s girlfriend--no character names given, which doesn’t help the generic quality of the archetypes dealt with here--is at first a reluctant participant in the movement. (One of their less inspired exchanges: “I missed you at class.” “Things on my mind. . . .”) But history sweeps everyone up together and, eventually, rips these two apart. Act 1 ends with the appearance, through stage fog and blaring red light, of that first tank on the square. Following the gunfire, the fatalities and the fall of the Goddess of Liberty statue, Act 2 lands on a full-ensemble note of hard-won optimism: “China is awakening/Everyone arise/It’s a new day for China.”

Dang’s lyrics, it must be said, are like dead weights tied to the score. (It’s hard to make phrases such as “foreign ministry officials” sit comfortably on a line of recitative.) Yet Iwataki’s better melodies--the letter-writing duet “Dear Father, Dear Son,” and “Spring Again in Beijing,” sung by the same characters--establish a properly rueful, affecting mood, intimations of the cost of political change, especially when dealing with the Chinese Communist Party.

Co-directors Dang and Deborah Nishimura stage the show briskly enough. A hair over two hours in length, it clicks along, deploying images recalling the political poster iconography of “Evita,” the raised-fist full-ensemble poses of “Rent” and the youthful revolutionary fervor of “Les Miserables.”

The eight-person cast is backed by a five-piece band. Musically, “Beijing Spring” receives an exceptional first airing. Lee, a former Broadway “Rent” understudy, and Goeku, lately on tour with “Miss Saigon,” support their anthems with relish. On the acting front, there’s particularly sharp character work contributed by Kimiko Gelman (especially good as one of the CCP hard-liners); you appreciate her speed and timing and easy charisma.

That “Beijing Spring” works on any level is near-miraculous, considering its potential self-parody quotient. In a sense, it feels like a concept album put up on a stage; the lesser songs tend to establish one notion or mood and stick to it, doggedly, rather than revealing anything unexpected. The big confrontation itself is a cheesy, strobe-lit affair. The quasi-satiric bits (“Harden the Hardline,” featuring a conference table full of CCP heads, and Deng’s whiny “It Could Have Been Me”) may give you a slight “Evita” hangover.

For all that, there’s plenty to enjoy, on sheer performance terms. “Beijing Spring” may be earnest to a fault. Yet its central father-son relationship--more central to the piece than the boyfriend-girlfriend angle, in the end--provides the hook for the score’s most unsentimentally affecting songs.

* “Beijing Spring,” East West Players, David Henry Hwang Theater, Union Center for the Arts, 120 N. Judge John Aiso St., Little Tokyo, downtown L.A. Thursdays-Fridays, 8 p.m. (except for 7 p.m. May 20); Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m. (no 2 p.m. performance May 15); Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends June 6. $25-$33. (800) 233-3123. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

Bryan Geli: Ensemble

Kimiko Gelman: Ensemble

Ai Goeku: Ensemble

Randall Guiaya: Ensemble

Alvin Ing: Ensemble

Brian Osborne Kawasaki: Ensemble

Michael K. Lee: Ensemble

Paul Wong: Ensemble

Written by Joel Iwataki and Tim Dang. Directed by Deborah Nishimura and Tim Dang. Musical direction by Scott Nagatani. Set by Lisa Hashimoto. Costumes by Dori Quan. Lighting by Guido Girardi. Props by Ken Takemoto. Production stage manager Ricardo Figueroa.