Shanghai Nu

Thursday night, I dropped by the Factory Theatre for the Next Stage Theatre Festival. It was the opening night for the sprawling cast of On the Other Side of the World, a memoir of the Jewish ghettos in Shanghai during World War II.

Ostensibly taken from the diary of Ursula (Ashleigh Hendry), an 11-year-old Jewish refugee from Germany, it chronicled their journey from an increasingly violent Third Reich in 1939 through to their departure from Shanghai in 1947 for America. This Eastern metropolis was the destination for tens of thousands of Jewish escapees as it remained open while other countries were closing their borders to Jews.

Shanghai was both opulent and strange as well as dirt-poor and squalid. For Ursula's parents, Irene (Debra Hale) and Martin (Nicholas Rice), and others including the Schulmans (Liza Balkan, Sam Rosenthal), it was a nasty cultural shock. Ursula quickly acclimated, learned some Mandarin (though it would have been Shanghainese), and made friends with the local merchants (Dale Yim), an itinerant monk (Ray Jacildo), concubines (Phoebe Hu, Eunjung Nam), and even an amah or nanny (Susan Lock). She found her first love in another Jewish refugee named Wolf (Jordan Kanner). Martin partnered with a local businessman to start a painting company. Only Irene had a hard time with her diminished circumstances. But as things started to improve, the Japanese (Minh Ly) came in, rounded up all foreigners, and restricted them to ghettos.

The staging was excellent. The cast moved and wheeled screens, crates, poles, and dozens of other props through intricate set-up to suggest a train, a ship, the streets of Shanghai, and various rooming houses. A small trio of cello, erdu, and pipa added some evocative music. But the overall story was superficial. With such a long time frame and so many characters, we were treated to a whirlwind narrative and didn't spend much time absorbing any given situation. Since this was not a true story but a synthesis from actual memoirs, playwright Brenley Charkow could have tightened the script.

The actors were good though now and then they were saddled with speechifying. I thought giving some actors Asian accents a misstep. Though the businessman spoke perfect English (better than Martin's pidgin according to Ursula) and the monk had an Oxford accent to go with his English schooling, it wasn't clear why the other Chinese characters did not. The fluent "English" of the Jewish refugees was presumably German, so it made no sense to have some Asian actors speak with an accent when in real-life, everyone would have. In some scenes, it made them overact with hammy and risibly caricaturist lines.