Now a musical?
Tony-winning playwright David Henry Hwang, who won a Tony Award for the 1997 musical Kinky Boots, is bringing his version of India’s The Joy Luck Club to Broadway, the New York Times reports.
The play, which opens Feb. 16 at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, tells the story of two sisters who struggle to come to terms with their Indian heritage in Seattle in the 1970s.
And now, a Broadway musical.
This isn’t the first time that Hwang has adapted a movie into a musical — he previously published in the form of a children’s book, adaptation of his short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.
Hwang’s book turned out to be more popular than the original book, The Joy Luck Club, which came out in 1993 and spawned a series of children’s movies featuring Jane Fonda, Julia Roberts, Ben Kingsley, and the late Farrah Fawcett.
In 2006, the Asian American playwright released a modern update of the movie that was called, The Joy Luck Club: To Love, and Be Loved.
The playwright told the Times he loved writing the film adaptation of his book because he was able to do so without any “technical constraints,” as opposed to writing a stage musical, where he doesn’t have that freedom. “I like that because it’s a form that is completely evasive,” he said.
Hwang told the Times that he doesn’t intend to make a connection between The Joy Luck Club and Trump. “For me, this was the story of two sisters,” he said. “The way the play is constructed is that one (feels) she has been let down by a very conservative, patriarchal society, and the other (feels) she’s gotten a lot of attention by that.”
That said, it’s worth noting that Trump has already used the hashtag #NiHaoIsDondeSuenos, as a means of connecting Puerto Rico and Myanmar. The song “Donde Suenos” is the lyric that refers to the iconic sign, which says, “Ni hao es ninguna,” which translates to “no matter who you are, you are from somewhere.”
Read the full story on The New York Times.
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