I am telling my friends to grab seats for Cambodian Rock Band, so let me tell you the same.
Want something significant? Dark? Potentially disturbing?
Cambodian Rock Band is an increasingly scary drama about the Khmer Rouge nightmare of the late 1970s, backed by a dozen mad Dengue Fever songs blazed out by a hot band.
Very sharply written by Lauren Yee and brilliantly performed by an exceptional ensemble of six actor/musicians, Cambodian Rock Band is a seriously entertaining show.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★ review here.]
Opening on Monday at the Pershing Square Signature Center, the production is staged by Chay Yew, a smart director who makes the dramatic utmost of offbeat works and certainly does so here.
Cambodian Rock Band begins energetically with a couple of loud, upbeat songs rendered by the Cyclos, a band of nice-looking Southeast Asian young people dressed in mid-Seventies style. So is their fun pop music; get-up-and-dance songs about drinking, surfing, motorbikes, and pretty girls, brightly swirling with flute and electric guitar riffs.
As the bandstand recedes, up pops Duch, an ageless Cambodian gent, who urbanely talks about Cambodia then and now and sets the place and time in Phnom Penh, its capitol, in 2008.
That’s where and when Neary is a young Cambodian-American lawyer doing war crimes work. She is about to prosecute the warden of S-21, a notorious prison during the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime of 1975-79 when millions perished in cruel circumstances.
On the eve of the trial, Neary’s father pays her a surprise visit from America. It is Chum’s first time back in Cambodia in 30 years. A bourgeois retiree whose manners mildly embarrass his daughter, Chum proves to be quite a different guy when the time flips back to 1975.
Back then as a teenager, Chum plays bass in Cyclos, the band he founded, and they’re busy recording “One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula” even as the Khmer Rouge forces threaten to overtake the city.
Later on, tense, terrifying scenes happen within a grim interrogation room in S-21. Here the imprisoned Chum encounters not only a former bandmate but forges an unlikely bond over a Bob Dylan song with Duch, by now revealed to be the monster prison warden.
Spiked with pop songs that accent Yee’s layered, suspenseful story, Cambodian Rock Band is a compelling depiction of a modern society transformed practically overnight into a brutal state where its artists and educated citizens were ground into dust. This is a terrible page in history well worth knowing in our own changing times. It is vividly rendered in strategic plotting and visceral language by the playwright. Giving a note of grace to a troubling story, Yee’s story also considers the power of music.
In a remarkable performance as Chum, Joe Ngo believably assumes or sheds some 30 years as his character switches between a dorky old dad and an oblivious rock ‘n’ roller who drives the band’s kickass playing. Moses Villarama neatly portrays Neary’s nice Canadian boyfriend and Chum’s closest bandmate. The scenes they share in the prison with Francis Jue—whose cool, cunning portrait of Duch as a killer bureaucrat is something eerie—makes for edge-of-your-seat theater.
Courtney Reed eases between being earnest Neary and the band’s sultry vocalist. Jane Lui and Abraham Kim also confidently play different roles and instruments. Everyone’s vivacious musical performances contribute to the energy that the director skillfully harnesses to shape the production, which benefits from the visuals of Linda Cho’s period clothing and Takeshi Kata’s flexible setting. David Weiner’s lighting design gives effective color and mood to every scene.
One of those intensifying dramas that sneaks up and grabs you by the throat, Cambodian Rock Band is a major event of the off-Broadway season likely to be remembered when awards are given in the spring.
