Tony nominees 'Maybe Happy Ending' and 'Yellow Face' champion Asian artists on Broadway

The Best Musical and Best Play Revival contenders, respectively, showcase Asian talent on and off stage and wrestle with Asian theatre's past and its future.

After 78 years of the Tony Awards, Daniel Dae Kim is the first Asian actor to be nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Leading Performance in a Play. Should he win, for playing "DHH" in the fall 2024 revival of David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face, he will only be the 19th person of Asian descent to win a Tony Award in history.

As Hwang expresses in his work (alongside Yellow Face, which premiered off Broadway in 2007, he is also best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning M. Butterfly), the past is never really past. Amid cuts to National Endowment of the Arts grants and diversity programs across industries, the evolving theatre landscape Hwang investigates still suggests progress when it comes to inclusion, even as the terrain threatens to become more unstable.

Other Asian American Tony nominees this year include Francis Jue as DHH’s father, Conrad Ricamora for Best Featured Actor in a Play in Oh, Mary!, Darren Criss for Best Leading Actor in a Musical in Maybe Happy Ending, and Nicole Scherzinger for Best Leading Actress in a Musical in Sunset Boulevard. There are fewer than 50 nominations for Asian American theatre artists over the Tonys' history, so these nominees, and the desire to tally them, still feel like news.

Jue, speaking with New York Theatre Guide on the phone after receiving his nomination, noted, “David wrote this play 20 years ago, but it feels like it was ripped from the headlines today because he's just that visionary a writer.” Yellow Face, a farce of race and performance, remixes real life with sly fiction and absurdity. Inspired by Hwang's real reactions to Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce’s casting (and Tony win) as a Eurasian character in Miss Saigon, Yellow Face examines how his attempts at change left him drained from seeing little difference in the years that followed. It satirizes the theatre world and asks if it, and the American dream, still has space for Asian people.

But Yellow Face is not without hope. The show’s vital conversations about the complexity of race reinforce the evergreen quality of Hwang’s writing and ideas. Yellow Face ends with a sting, but DHH also writes an imagined play in which he makes his father’s dream come true in fiction: He creates “a world where he could be Jimmy Stewart. And a white guy — can even be Asian. That's what you do after your father dies. You make his dream your own.”

If Yellow Face wrestles with the past of Asians in theatre, Maybe Happy Ending provides a pathway for the future. Created by 2025 Tony Award nominees Will Aronson and Hue Park, the sci-fi-meets-Korean-drama musical imagines two robots coming to terms with their disposability and mortality. Jazz-obsessed Oliver (Criss) develops a connection with fellow HelperBot Claire (Helen J. Shen), whom he takes on a trip to visit his former owner. Each helping the other (Oliver has a charger Claire needs; Claire knows how to drive), they discover their function has long been to live for others and not for themselves, but the two ways of being can be compatible.

Maybe Happy Ending premiered in Seoul in 2016, and its Broadway transfer bears the marks of cultural cross-pollination, such as Oliver’s American jazz expertise. And it’s full of bittersweetness about memory, technology, and the intimacy we create in a world that threatens to turn connection into a commodity.

Stories like these, that have a definite Asian point of view but still access the universal, speak to the theatre world needing to be a tapestry of lives, perspectives, and points of view. Shen told New York Theatre Guide the beauty of Asian artists' contributions to the history of theatre is variety: “In my own family and my own community, I see so many differing and paradoxical stories.”

When asked about what kinds of stories she wants to see in this emerging Asian theatre canon, Shen said, “I want to see more. I went to school for musical theatre as my concentration, I felt like I was limited because of the amount of stories that I was able to tell and able to tell authentically.”

Revivals of plays about the lack of representation, rightly celebrated as they are, risk becoming a substitute for new work made by and for underrepresented communities. But Maybe Happy Ending, a fully original musical, imagines that future of new Asian theatre.

“The problem is when you start marketing a show as ‘the Asian show’, or ‘this Asian story’, people feel unrepresented," Shen said. "They feel like that will always fall short, because not everybody will feel represented by that story. And so the answer is [to] keep digging at what's true.”

Get Maybe Happy Ending tickets now.

Yellow Face photo credit: Joan Marcus
Maybe Happy Ending photo credit: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman