On Tuesday, May 8, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., Boston Public Library, SpeakEasy Stage Company, and Boston Asian American Film Festival host actor, icon, and social media guru George Takei, best known as “Mr. Sulu” on TV’s Star Trek, for a candid conversation about the hit Broadway musical “Allegiance,” based on his childhood experience during World War II. Click here for details.
“Allegiance” has its East Coast regional premiere at the SpeakEasy Stage Company. Under the direction of Paul Daigneault, “Allegiance” will be presented at SpeakEasy May 4–June 2. For tickets, click here.
Takei spoke to Boston Spirit for this article by Spirit’s Arts Editor Loren King in the current May/June issue of Boston Spirit magazine (Subscribe for free today):
“Allegiance,” the stage musical based on actor, activist and LGBT icon George Takei’s childhood experiences in an interment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II, might owe its existence to Takei’s own tears.
“When Brad [Altman, Takei’s husband] and I are in New York, we go to the theater almost every night of the week,” says Takei in a telephone interview with Boston Spirit. Takei recounted how at a performance of the musical “In the Heights” he wept openly during the song “Inutil” (“Useless”) sung by a father to his daughter.
“The song was about the father’s sense of anguish that he could not send his beloved daughter to college. I was a child of five when we were interred. Later, as a teenager, I could find nothing about the interment in the history books I read. So I engaged my father in after-dinner conversation about our imprisonment during the second World War. He told me how anguished he was to be imprisoned with his three young children,” says Takei. ”It tortured him, thinking about us, and tore him apart. That song reminded me of that.”
At the intermission, as Takei “was crying copious tears and Brad was edging away from me,” another gay couple that Takei and Altman had recently met at another show—Jay Kuo, a composer, and Lorenzo Thione, a producer—came over to chat. “They asked about my tears and I told them about my childhood imprisonment and that intrigued them tremendously,” says Takei, who first detailed his internment experience in his 1994 autobiography “To the Stars.” Takei expressed his desire to turn his memoir into a drama. “But Jay said, ‘No, it has got to be a musical.” A couple of weeks later, Kuo sent Takei a song he’d written called “Allegiance.”
“There I was, at my computer, crying again,” laughs Takei. “I knew he had the ability to tell this story and we began to develop it. It’s my parents’ story.”
“Allegiance” follows the Kimura family whose lives are upended as they and 120,000 other Japanese-Americans are forced to leave their homes following the attack on Pearl Harbor, just as George Takei, his parents, younger brother and sister were uprooted from their Los Angeles home and imprisoned first in Arkansas and later at an even more restrictive camp at the California-Colorado border.
“Allegiance” debuted in 2012 at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego with Takei, who just turned 81, portraying a grandfather and a soldier who looks back at the events in his life. Takei reprised the roles when the show opened on Broadway in 2015 (it was Takei’s Broadway debut) and, most recently, he starred in the Los Angeles production. Now Takei heads to Boston not as an actor but as an audience member when “Allegiance” has its East Coast regional premiere at the SpeakEasy Stage Company. Under the direction of Paul Daigneault, “Allegiance” will be presented at SpeakEasy May 4–June 2.
“It’s my first opportunity to actually be in the audience and see it,” says Takei. “It’s my legacy project so I have to monitor it as it becomes ubiquitous all over the world. … There’s talk of screening [the filmed version] all over Japan so we’re making plans to be there in November of this year.
“I love Boston. A few years ago, I was asked to speak at Boston University about the interment of Japanese Americans and relating that to LGBT issues. It was in the dead of winter; bone-chilling cold and snow as high as rooftops.” He also came to Boston in 2014 when Jennifer M. Kroot’s documentary “To Be Takei” screened in the Boston Asian American Film Festival.
Though Takei is famous for playing Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise, in the television series “Star Trek,” Takei says he’s just as likely now to be approached by fans who know him by his catchphrase, “Oh Myyyy.” Besides his strong presence on social media, Takei is a frequent television commentator on social justice issues and an unabashed Trump critic. His opinion of Trump came from personal experience: Takei in 2012 was a celebrity contestant on Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice” (he was “fired” in the third episode).
Takei recalls having lunch with Trump back when Takei was advocating for marriage equality. “This was before New York had gay marriage. We met for lunch and I tried to convince him that marriage equality would be profitable for him, as a businessman, and he said, ‘Yes, that’s true, but I believe in traditional marriage.’ I was taken aback, given his marital history. There’s the hypocrisy right there,” says Takei.
A longtime LGBT rights advocate, Takei in 2008 married his partner Brad Altman in a Buddhist ceremony at the Democracy Forum of the Japanese American National Museum of Los Angeles which Takei helped found and for which he’s served as board chairman. The wedding party included Takei’s former “Star Trek” colleagues Walter Koenig (“Chekov”) and Nichelle Nichols (“Uhura”).
Takei’s high profile and outspokenness may have contributed to one accusation of sexual impropriety leveled at him in November 2017 by Scott R. Brunton. Takei issued a swift denial on social media. No other accusations have surfaced.
“It was completely fabricated by a delusional person … but I won’t get into a ‘he said, he said.’ I will let it lie for now and address and challenge it when we’re in a different climate,” Takei says. “There’s a shift happening in our society; a social and cultural revolution going on, and that should [be allowed to run] its full course.”
Takei credits his father with nurturing his social activism by teaching him that democracy is fragile and that fighting for it is the responsibility of every American.
“My father bore the pain and anguish and rage the most … He explained American democracy to me. He’s the one who made me who I am,” says Takei.
The memory of his parents has been with him throughout the long journey that brought “Allegiance” to fruition.
“Before we opened on Broadway, Jay called to say, ‘The marquee is going up’ at the Longacre Theater. Brad and I literally ran down and got there in time to see my name and [actress] Lea Salonga’s name going up,” says Takei. “The first thought that came to me was, ‘I wish my parents were here to see their surname on the marquee of a Broadway theater.’ It is their story. I did the whole thing as a tribute to them. I wish they could have been here to see it.”
