Review: CAMBODIAN ROCK BAND at East West Players

This play jolts. Sorry, meaningful metaphors sometimes fail. How easy it would be to kick off any review of Lauren Yee’s CAMBODIAN ROCK BAND – a play about, uh huh, a Cambodian rock band and quite a bit more – by saying said production “rocks!” Rock, it most certainly does.

Chay Yew’s production for East West Players - improbably the play’s L.A. premiere seven years after its debut at South Coast Repertory – is as raw and raucous as it is timely. Through her true events-inspired plot, her titular band, and their music as provided by Dengue Fever, Yee urges us to remember the past, be watchful of the future and enjoy the holy hell out of the process.

Easily done. The music electrically foregrounds what is, in part, a concert experience. Most of the six-person cast - who handle the live music as well as the acting – are original SCR company members including Joe Ngo and Daisuke Tsuji who play the central pro- and antagonists. Yew has directed several major regional theater productions of the play to date. Even when he's plugging in and playing a new company member here or there (and the performance I reviewed included an understudy in a key role), Yew’s task of getting the band back together for the East West Players staging figured to be successful. This company's work is too good. 

The play begins – and ends – with music, the sounds of the Cyclos, a bubble gummy, Western-influenced band from 1975 whose tunes can also spin righteous or political as the need arises. Which it will. Our band members are bass guitarist Leng (played by Tim Liu), keyboardist Pou (Jane Lui, also the production’s co-music director with Matthew MacNelly), lead vocalist Sothea (Kelsey Angel Baehrens), drummer Rom (Abraham Kim) and electric guitarist Chum (Joe Ngo). Their songs, performed mostly in Cambodian, talk about girls, about nostalgic memories, about being young and confused. They have a beat and are certainly danceable.

But before we can get too deeply into their first set, it's interrupted by an officious emcee – Duch (Daisuke Tsuji), AKA Kang Kech Leu, who provides us with some key bits of Cambodian history, reminds us that he is in charge:  “I am watching, watching, always watching,” and ushers us three decades into the future.

In 2008 Phnom Penh, human rigths attorney Neary (Baehrens) receives an unexpected visit from her father, Chum, his first time setting foot in Cambodia in 30 years. His arrival coincides with Neary’s high-profile prosecution of Duch for war crimes. Following the Khmer Rouge’s takeover in 1978, Duch, the right hand man to Pol Pot, supervised the S-21 prison and the murders of tens of thousands of people.

Chum has more than a proud papa’s interest in the outcome of Neary’s efforts; he has a highly shrouded past of which his daughter is unaware. The jovial and slightly goofy dad can delight in fish spas, free cokes and other modern amenities of present day Cambodia, but the man wasn’t ever thus. He’s here to protect his daughter and possibly to make some peace with the past.

The action jumps between the two eras. In 2008, Neary is learning new things about her father, doubting her ability to get the job done, and ultimately disappearing. Back in 1978 as the Khmer Rouge is taking over, the Cyclos is fracturing and their music – all music – is coming to an end. The band members may not make it out alive, so – as the first act draws to its turbulent conclusion - they pick up their instruments and bang out one final song as the world explodes around them.

Thankfully, as CAMBODIAN ROCK BAND moves into its riveting and occasionally harrowing second act, the music isn't over. Songs are sung as barter, as protest, as statements of liberation. Of course, Chum would find occasion to do a solo on Bob Dylan’s “Times They Are A-Changin’” (A bit on the nose, certainly, but no less effective in Ngo’s rendering of it.)  It should come as a shock to nobody – well, other than Neary - that Chum and Duch have met before, and the circumstances of their interactions make up the meat of the play.

As both the younger and fiftysomething incarnations of Chum, Ngo is superb. He gives us a survivor whose wounds may never heal, but who is determined nonetheless to get to some kind of better place. Youthful or middle aged, shrewd or sandbagging, the actor’s work will crack you open.

Tsuji’s Duch, meanwhile, is riveting in a very different way. Duch is prone to noting that in his civilian life pre S21, he was a math teacher, which opens him up to the kind of wordplay that only a sociopathic ghoul would utter: “They figured I would be good at reducing sums.” On the one hand, the man’s a monster who gleefully delights in his role as a ringmaster (think the Emcee from CABARET gone sadistic). But monsters don’t come into the world pre-formed. Tsuji infuses this complicated man with cracked charisma; we’re never quite sure where he’s guiding us, but it’s impossible to turn away.

For the record, in March of 2025, it's no simple task to watch a story in which the world is uprooted by tyranny, in which a character based on a many who existed in real life can welcome us back into the theater woth the warning/reminder:

no phones, no pagers

no photography, technology, or recording devices of any kind

no artists, intellectuals, or capitalists

no hospitals, no schools, no factories no banks, money, religion, or holidays

no glasses, no electricity

personal property? nyet!

individual feelings? nein.

your children are now our children.

your snacks are now our snacks.

and most of all: no music.

Yee wrote this important play in 2018. In 2025, it’s a little less easy to enjoy the music.

Note: In the performance I reviewed, understudy Zandi de Jesus played the roles of Neary/Sothea.

CAMBODIAN ROCK BAND plays through March 23 at 20 N Judge John Aiso Street, Los Angeles.

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