Stage and Cinema
- Highly Recommended
"...Kung Fu, Sidekick, Wise Man, Dead: The Hollywood Starter Pack. Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yankee Dawg You Die pulls no punches in its portrait of two Asian-American actors navigating Hollywood’s tangled machinery—one a hardened veteran, the other freshly idealistic. Set in the late 1980s but pulsing with urgency in 2025, the play opens on a Hollywood Hills balcony, where Bradley Yamashita—young, hungry, and convinced he’ll make it on talent alone—meets Vincent Chang, a seasoned actor. What begins as a chance encounter at an industry party quickly spirals into a pointed, often wryly funny series of vignettes exploring assimilation, compromise, and the daily grind of trying to be seen as fully human in an industry that loves to flatten difference into caricature."
LA Splash
- Highly Recommended
"...Skillfully helmed by Jennifer Chang, YANKEE DAWG YOU DIE navigates life in Hollywood for those earlier decades with dark humor and insightful challenges. Yee and Kim clearly inhabit their personas while energetically managing to laugh at themselves and "the system," personified by the Chop Suey Circuit. Secrets abounded - including Vincent's changing his last name to conceal his Japanese ancestry during WW II and his choice to remain "in the closet" in order to succeed professionally - secrets which Bradley has little need for in the more enlightened 1980s."
Stage Scene LA
- Highly Recommended
"...Kelvin Han Yee and Daniel J. Kim are on fire in East West Players' 37th-anniversary revival of Yankee Dawg You Die, Philip Kan Gotanda's look at Asian-American representation on stage and screen, at how it has changed since the days of Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa, and at the changes that remained to be made in 1988 ... and still do in 2025."
LA Theatrix
- Recommended
"...A similar complexity of representation, race, economics and old Hollywood is explored by playwright Philip Kan Gotanda in "Yankee Dawg You Die." The show premiered in 1988 at Berkeley Rep, with a staging at Los Angeles Theatre Center (LATC) a few months later. The 1980s setting of the show is represented courtesy of Jason H. Thompson's pre-show video projections of RC Cola and Calvin Klein jeans billboards on Yuri Okahana-Benson's oblique quadrilateral set design."
ArtsBeatLA
- Recommended
"...Jennifer Chang's direction is smooth and professional, benefiting greatly from Jason H. Thompson's projection design of Hollywood locations and Asian American stars from the past. Her staging of the scene in which the two leads create a new Godzilla movie is delightful. Gotanda is certainly to be lauded for writing a play about the issue of Asian American representation in the entertainment industry, and the fact that it's being revived demonstrates that its message is still relevant. It's often quite funny, as in a scene in which Vincent remembers thinking that Neil Sedaka might be Asian because his last name sounded Japanese, or when Bradley suggests that Vincent could have won an award for an Actor with Less than Five Lines. That being said, the play also has character speeches that meander and in general the show feels like it could use some tightening up."
Stage Raw
- Highly Recommended
"...Throughout, Thompson's series of video images - posted on multiple screens to the side and above the proscenium (scenic design by Yuri Okahana-Benson) - add immeasurable color and substance, in particular photos of real-life Asian American celebrities in their nightclub milieu, as well as images of '80s Hollywood (like Tower Records and Angelyne). Add to this starry nights whose (imagined) constellations Vincent remarks on as he and Bradley make small talk that grows more meaningful from our first glimpse of them to our last. Lighting by Scott Bolman and sound by Jesse Mandapat underscore both drama and comedy, along with the shifts between those moments which the characters have to themselves and the scenes they play so flawlessly together."
Nerds Of Color
- Recommended
"...Director Jennifer Chang utilizes live media to punch up the show and while most of it were realized well, I had a tremendous issue with the usage of AI for their historical photograph display. While I can understand why it would be more dynamic to see these historical photographs of past Asian American actors come to life a la Harry Potter, AI still has an uncanny valley effect that served more as a distraction than a complementary element to the show. Just having the photographs speak for themselves would have been enough (not withstanding the ethical issue of AI wasting enormous resources just for answering a question, let alone generating moving pictures)."
Broadway World
- Highly Recommended
"...East West Players' revival of Philip Kan Gotanda's 1988 play YANKEE DAWG YOU DIE arrives at a moment where Asian actors enjoy considerably more opportunities both on screen and on stage than would have been available to the Vincent Changs of Hollywood yesteryear. In some respects, Gotanda's play feels like a museum piece. On another level, the generational dynamic between an older thespian and the young buck who idolizes the man while despising what he represents, is as relevant as ever. A tale of community and the frailty of Tinseltown dreams, YANKEE DAWG is given a full-throated production by actors Daniel J. Kim and Kelvin Han Yee under the direction of Jennifer Chang."
