Francis Jue on His Full-Circle Return to Yellow Face and the Right Way to Do Broadway's Controversial Classics

Francis Jue’s stage career has been happily entwined with the works of David Henry Hwang for 35 years, since Jue understudied the title role in M. Butterfly. Although they look nothing alike, Jue played Hwang in the rollicking 2019 off-Broadway musical Soft Power, a dozen years after his Obie Award-winning performance as Hwang’s father, Henry, in Yellow Face. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2008, the play never made it to Broadway until now, with TV favorite Daniel Dae Kim as Hwang alongside Jue, again, as Henry, a Chinese-American banker caught in a racially charged government investigation.

That’s just one strand in the plot of this ahead-of-its-time mockumentary: Yellow Face kicks off with Hwang embroiled in the controversy over Jonathan Pryce playing an Asian pimp in Miss Saigon while mistakenly casting a white actor as the Asian lead in his own ill-fated play. The result is a farce that also touches the heart, thanks to Jue’s warm and loving performance. It’s been a busy year for the veteran actor, who reunited with his Thoroughly Modern Millie castmates Sutton Foster, Harriet Harris and Cheyenne Jackson in the City Center premiere of Once Upon a Mattress. (Brooks Ashmanskas assumed the role of the Wizard on Broadway when Jue chose to do Yellow Face.) In a chat with Broadway.com, Jue reflected on his life in the theater and gratitude to “DHH.”

How does it feel to revisit a play you helped introduce 17 years ago?

Way back in 2005, when I started doing readings of scenes from Yellow Face, I knew it was a great play. It’s a hilarious backstage romp that also deals with how [Asian-Americans] are portrayed in the media and in politics, and who we are in our own families. Aren’t those universal questions? After the play opened at the Public in 2007, I kept waiting for the announcement that we would be moving to Broadway, so I’m amazed and grateful to Roundabout that we have finally gotten here. David’s work is incredibly topical—what was innovative and astounding in 2007 feels like it was ripped from the headlines today.

What’s it like to play father and son with Daniel Dae Kim?

Daniel is a mensch and a hero of mine. I’ve admired him since we were babies in New York in the mid-’80s, although his career has taken a very different path [laughs]. He is not only a supremely gifted actor, he’s also an advocate who walks the talk, so for him to be playing an Asian-American role model in this play truly is “meta.” One thing that strikes me about Daniel is that from the moment the show begins, you can feel the audience embrace him. Too often, Asian characters are seen as representatives from a far-off country rather than as sympathetic human beings. But when people see Daniel on stage, they immediately identify with him. He has such an open heart, and I’m hoping his success is the wedge that will give more Asian actors the opportunity to do what we’re capable of.

You’ve had the strange experience of portraying both David Henry Hwang [in Soft Power] and his late father [in Yellow Face] on stage.

It is a unique kind of terror to play the playwright when he’s in the room, but playing his dad is a different kind of anxiety because it’s also about their relationship. David himself has been so sweet and supportive. The one piece of advice he gave me was that whenever his dad entered a room, he was the star of that room. That clue gave me a great deal of freedom. I’ll never forget when David’s mom came to see the show at the Public. She said that I didn’t look like Henry, I didn’t sound like Henry, but for the past couple of hours she felt like she had been spending time with her husband. Even then, when I was 17 years younger, playing David’s dad reminded me of my relationships with my own family and my hopes of being seen and known by them.

You grew up in San Francisco, the sixth of nine children. Did your parents think you were crazy when you decided to become an actor?

Oh, completely crazy! They said they would disown me if I studied theater in college, for understandable reasons. I can’t imagine having a kid who wanted to go into acting. Of all her nine kids, my mom said I was the only one she worried about, even as an adult. It is a ridiculous way to live, but a glorious way to make a living. It’s allowed me to meet all sorts of people and to eke out a living; my folks never quite trusted that that would happen. I mean, look at me—I’m this little underweight Asian guy! How much room is there in this industry for that? They did become more supportive once they understood how hard I worked. They came backstage once when I was doing M. Butterfly on the road, and my dad, who was an engineer for the Navy, watched the crew packing up and said, “Wow, this looks like work.” And I said, “Yeah, it’s all work. Even for the people on stage, it’s work!”

You’ve done productions of Miss Saigon and The King and I, both of which are skewered in Yellow Face. What do you think of those shows now?

I believe The King and I is ultimately a progressive show if you do it in a way that doesn’t fall into traps. We’ve all seen productions where the king is like a petulant child, but actually, he was ruling the only Asian country never to have been colonized by a western power—and he raised a son who helped modernize the country. It’s easy to do the show as the tale of a white British woman coming in to educate the natives, but I don’t think Rodgers and Hammerstein intended that to be that story. It’s the same with Miss Saigon: There are ways of doing it that fall into traps—that turn the Engineer into a symbol and the women into simply pieces of meat. But the [Vietnam] war actually happened, prostitution happened, and how does one survive under extreme circumstances? Why would a woman give up her child? That is the tragedy of Miss Saigon, not some exotic notion of what it means be an evil Asian guy. At the same time, there are plenty of opportunities to do these shows badly, so there are reasons to protest them and support artists doing something new. I’ve gotten the chance to work with people like David Henry Hwang, Lauren Yee, Hansol Jung, and Yilong Liu, amazing writers telling healing stories that happen to be populated with Asian people.

I assume you feel the same way about Thoroughly Modern Millie, your comic breakthrough show [as laundry worker Bun Foo, alongside Tony winner Harriet Harris as the villainous Mrs. Meers].

I think the trio of Harriet, Ken Leung [as Ching Ho] and I was hilarious and revolutionary in 2002—to have actual Chinese immigrants in a show, speaking their own language, singing in Mandarin, having their own storyline and winding up being the heroes. It was 1922; every character in the show was coming to New York to do something new, including Bun Foo and Ching Ho, and that’s the way we played it. I wouldn’t have done it if I felt differently. I understand that there have been problems in other productions, and I will dare say that people shouldn’t do Millie unless they understand Millie. It’s possible to make any play racist if you don’t understand it. But I have a soft spot for Millie because it was a lovely world to visit for a couple of hours every day, and to get to do it on Broadway was just a glorious, glorious time.

How did you picture your career unfolding when you moved to New York?

Honestly, I never imagined having a career in this business. I was an English major at Yale, and I was asked by a friend I did shows with there to audition for the [1984 off-Broadway] revival of Pacific Overtures. I started commuting to New York and was surrounded by Asian actors, but even so, I never thought I would do this and went back to school. Five years later, I got a call from [casting director] Meg Simon, who had seen Pacific Overtures and asked me to audition to understudy M. Butterfly on Broadway. I said, “I work at the AIDS Foundation in San Francisco—I don’t have the money for a flight,” so she got [producer] Stuart Ostrow to pay for a plane ticket and a hotel room and tickets to the show. The next thing I know, I’m moving to New York.

Talk about full circle with David Henry Hwang…

No one could expect to have a career like this! Early on, I don't think I knew what I was capable of or what the industry would accept, but I always took the craft seriously. Whether it was a small part in a Shakespeare play at the Public or Amadeus out of town, I put my heart and soul into it because I love the idea of telling stories with other people. I just think there’s something sacred about that.