The cast of Soft Power in rehearsal. Photo: Jenny Anderson
An interloper arrives in a nation with some backward ideas, meets a political figure with a lot of power, and convinces them to modernize a bit and change their ways — that’s the formula for many classic tales about European expansion, from Rudyard Kipling up through Seven Years in Tibet, often with a bit of cheery music thrown in, à la The King and I. But it’s also the formula that playwright David Henry Hwang and composer Jeanine Tesori are working with in their “play with a musical” Soft Power, though with the typical power dynamics reversed.