Is there anything much less politically threatening than a rock band jamming to its personal vibrant track? Tell that to the Khmer Rouge, which descended on Cambodia in 1975 and killed off some three million individuals, together with many musicians. In Lauren Yee’s play “Cambodian Rock Band,” the doomed, fictional band Cyclo is represented by means of actor-musicians with considerable musical chops and large affection for his or her unwell-fated characters.
Yee’s supportive textual content is decided in 2008, when Neary (Courtney Reed, stunning), an American-born lawyer and the daughter of feisty Cambodian-born friend (Joe Ngo, laying it on thick), is in Phnom Penh with a global justice group preparing to take some infamous battle criminals to trial. The contemporary squabbling between the absolutely westernized Neary and her traditionalist father is balk-worthy, however the vivid flashback scenes set within the Seventies are riveting.
within the play, Cyclo, the personable rock band hailed here, have been among the many 90% of Cambodia’s musicians who had been killed all through the genocide that decimated the country throughout the reign of the Khmer Rouge. The onstage band performs track it is a mix of Cambodian radio hits from the period and songs composed by way of the modern neighborhood Dengue Fever, infectiously joyous in the exuberant singing fashion of Reed, who doubles right here as vocalist. Many of the tunes are heavily influenced via Western surf-rock, with “Champa Battambang,” a fine looking track that opens the 2d act, among the most memorable.
if you’re nonetheless following the wooly plot, Neary is looking for a different survivor of the genocide that worn out all but a handful of some 20,000 prisoners that the Pol Pot surpassed over to a grasp torturer named Duch. Fantastically performed by using Francis Jue, the person is a monster whose cruel methods are amply illustrated in one scene so extreme that it’s pretty much unwatchable. Irony of ironies, both the prisoner and one of the penitentiary guards turn out to have been members of the now defunct band of their adolescence.
In sharp contrast with the thin father-daughter battle that advanced the first act, the detention center scenes have more of a kick. When pal is thrown in reformatory on suspicion of being a spy, he struggles to have in mind why old people and kids are accused of spying and due to this fact eradicated: “Our total country is starving to dying, and here's what the Khmer Rouge is concerned about?”
Tellingly, these complicated-to-take reformatory scenes are bereft of song. The band best figures in them as a result of they, too, had been snatched up within the wholesale acts of genocide. When the song does kick in once more, the tune is Dylan’s “times they are A-Changin,’” which in reality makes little feel right here. Stronger hold on for the rousing finale, when this ingratiating community gets down and rocks like it’s 1975.
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