East West Players (EWP) and Japanese American Cultural & Community Center (JACCC)’s Los Angeles premiere of the Broadway musical Allegiance has been nominated for 4 LA Stage Alliance Ovation Awards including Lead Actress in a Musical for Elena Wang, Featured Actor in a Musical for Eymard Cabling, Sound Design (Large Theater) for Cricket Myers and Video/Project Design (Large Theater) for Adam Flemming.
The Ovation Awards are the only peer-judged theatre awards in Los Angeles, created to recognize excellence in theatrical performance, production, and design in the Greater Los Angeles area.
This year, the ceremony will be held at The Theatre at Ace Hotel on Monday, January 28th. Tickets go on sale Monday, November 26th, and full information can be found on OvationAwards.com.
Broadway cast members included George Takei, Elena Wang as Kei Kimura, Greg Watanabe as Mike Masaoka, Scott Watanabe as Tatsuo Kimura, and Janelle Dote as Hanako.
The cast also featured Ethan Le Phong as Sammy Kimura, Eymard Cabling as Frankie Suzuki, and Natalie Holt MacDonald as Hannah Campbell. The ensemble includes Cesar Cipriano, Jordan Goodsell, Sharline Liu, Miyuki Miyagi, Glenn Shiroma, Chad Takeda, and Grace Yoo.
With music and lyrics by Jay Kuo and a book by Marc Acito, Jay Kuo, and Lorenzo Thione, Allegiance tells the story of the Kimura family, whose lives are upended when they and 120,000 other Japanese-Americans are forced to leave their homes following the events of Pearl Harbor. Sam Kimura seeks to prove his patriotism by fighting for his country in the war, but his sister, Kei, fiercely protests the government’s treatment of her people. An uplifting testament to the power of the human spirit, Allegiance follows the Kimuras as they fight between duty and defiance, custom and change, family bonds and forbidden loves. Allegiance had its 2012 world premiere in a record-breaking engagement at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego and played on Broadway from 2015-16 at The Shubert Organization’s Longacre Theatre.
With a career spanning six decades, George Takei is known around the world for his founding role in the acclaimed television series “Star Trek,” in which he played Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the Starship Enterprise. But Takei’s story goes where few stories have gone before. From a childhood spent with his family wrongfully imprisoned in a Japanese American internment camp during World War II to becoming one of the country’s leading figures in the fight for social justice, LGBTQ rights, and marriage equality-Takei remains a powerful voice on issues ranging from politics to pop culture. Takei made his Broadway debut in the musical Allegiance, which ran in New York in 2015 and 2016. The musical is inspired by Takei’s true-life experience as a Japanese American who-from age 5 to 9-was unjustly imprisoned in two US internment camps during World War II. In 2017, Takei returned to the New York stage, starring in a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, directed by John Doyle at Classic Stage Company. Mashable.com named Takei the #1 most-influential person on Facebook, currently with nearly 10.3 million likes and 2.3 million followers on Twitter. Takei lives in Los Angeles with his husband Brad Takei.
East West Players (EWP), the nation’s longest-running professional theatre of color and the largest producing organization of Asian American artistic work, was founded in 1965, at a time when Asian Pacific Islanders (APIs) faced limited or no opportunities to see their experiences reflected outside of stereotypical and demeaning caricatures in the American landscape. EWP not only ensures that API stories are told, but works to increase access, inclusion, and representation in the economy.
Founded in 1971, Japanese American Cultural & Community Center is one of the largest ethnic arts and cultural centers of its kind in the United States. A hub for Japanese and Japanese American arts and culture and a community gathering place for the diverse voices it inspires-JACCC connects traditional and contemporary; community participants and creative professionals; Southern California and the world beyond. JACCC also provides office space in its five-story complex to a wide variety of nonprofit cultural, educational, and community-based organizations in Los Angeles.
The original Broadway production of Allegiance opened on November 8, 2015 at the Longacre Theater in New York City and was produced by Sing Out, Louise! Productions and ATA with Mark Mugiishi/Hawaii HUI, Hunter Arnold, Ken Davenport, Elliott Masie, Sandi Moran, Mabuhay Productions, Barbara Freitag; Marsi Gardiner, Valiant Ventures, Wendy Gillespie, David Hiatt Kraft, Diane Blumenthal, M. Bradley Calobrace, Karen Tanz, Gregory Rae, Mike Karns, in association with Jas Grewal, Peter Landin, and Ron Polson.
For more information, visit allegiancemusical.com/LA
Backstage Pass with Lia Chang 