2009
This award recognizes Yussef El Guindi’s play, Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat, which premiered in March 2008 at Silk Road Theatre Project in Chicago.
Read MoreEach of the seven writers approached these questions in different ways. Khoury chose to focus on the sociology and politics of ancestry, a “story about the tensions of New America for a city filled with New Americans,” while fellow writer Elizabeth Wong infused her experience with humor... Both writers found that the source material encouraged divergent themes. Creating art out of science proved not a hindrance, but fertile imaginative grounds with more overlap than expected.
Read MoreFeaturing a lineup of Broadway tunes about the Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean experience, the cabaret is based on a winking irony that nearly all these musicals were written by Americans and Brits, many in an "exoticized, Orientalized, otherized" vein.
Read MoreIt is a very charming way to spend a 70-minute evening listening to songs from popular Broadway shows that are set in locations along the ancient Silk Road and sung by a talented multi-cultural cast.
Read MoreJamil Khoury has put together a marvelous song book with lots of surprises and with the cast they have on board, each song has the true feeling that an audience would expect from the lyrics and music as written by the composer.
Read MoreCurated by Jamil Khoury, this revue looks at how Broadway and Tin Pan Alley have portrayed cultures along the ancient trade route from Japan to the Mediterranean. The sly and thoughtful assortment of songs ranges from South Pacific's "Carefully Taught" to a delightful "Slow Boat to China," and the mostly Asian cast add personal reminiscences that tend to focus on what it's like to be a second-generation actor with skeptical immigrant parents. The stories are touching, if repetitive, and David Rhee's how-I-got-that-show tale about landing a part in the Broadway company of Thoroughly Modern Millie segues nicely into "Stranger in Paradise" from Kismet. The intimate cabaret setting and ingratiating performances add up to a pleasant journey through novel musical territory.
Read More[The show] is quietly provocative. And as you listen to its two dozen mostly well-known songs-whose stage locales span the thousands of miles of the ancient Silk Road terrain from Japan and China to Italy- you begin to hear them in new ways.
Read MoreThe revue is both playful and ironic in its depiction of Silk Road persona... Each of the talent stepped up to showcase their vocal chops. The concept works as one of the most refreshing cabaret revues I’ve seen in years.
Read MoreWith its latest show, Silk Road Cabaret: Broadway Sings the Silk Road, [Silk Road Rising] has hit on a truly inspired idea -- gathering a diverse cast to sing songs from hit musicals that, when grouped together, traverse much of the Silk Road route.
Read MoreSilk Road Cabaret: Broadway Sings the Silk Road features songs from popular Broadway musicals set along the Silk Road—from Pacific Overtures to Two Gentlemen of Verona to Jesus Christ Superstar to The King and I to Zorba to Miss Saigon, and many more in between. This bold and harmonious East-West interplay blends music with personal stories and showcases performers of diverse backgrounds as they claim, reclaim, subvert, and poke fun at a host of old favorites from the Broadway repertoire.
Read More[It’s] inevitable that our first full production of a non-American play hail from the rough and tumble, sophisticated, and provocative world of the Israeli theatre. I’d even argue that Motti Lerner’s Pangs of the Messiah reflects the very raison d’etre of SRTP: it’s a play born of conflict yet bred of hope.
Read MoreYou may ask yourselves, “What is a nice Arab American artistic director like Jamil doing producing a play about right wing Jewish settlers living in the West Bank?” Or conversely you’re thinking “What could be more apropos?”...
Read MoreDeveloped by Silk Road Rising, SouthAsianPlaywrights.Org is a dynamic new website created to showcase and promote American and Canadian playwrights of South Asian descent.
Read MoreAsian performers put their own spin on selections from Asia-centric musicals, from South Pacific to Aida, in a revue opening October 21.
Read MoreOur online initiative, SouthAsianPlaywrights.org, allows us to generate greater exposure and more opportunities for American and Canadian playwrights of South Asian backgrounds. This initiative defines South Asians as people with ancestry in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, including people of mixed ancestries, who create works relevant to their intersectional identities. SouthAsianPlaywrights.org connects participating playwrights and their (English language) plays with theatre companies, cultural organizations, academic institutions, artistic directors, producers, literary managers, editors, publishers, and agents.
Read MoreThis exclusive event for Silk Road Theatre Project subscribers and donors featured an intimate conversation with Lauren Yee, playwright of Ching Chong Chinaman, and Artistic Director Jamil Khoury.
Read MoreThe ultra-assimilated Wong family is as Chinese American as apple pie: teenager Upton dreams of World of Warcraft superstardom; his sister Desi dreams of early admission to Princeton. Unfortunately, Upton's chores and homework get in the way of his 24/7 videogaming, and Desi's math grades don't fit the Asian American stereotype. Then Upton comes up with a novel solution for both problems: he acquires a Chinese indentured servant, who harbors an American dream of his own.
Performed as part of Chinese Cultural Week in Chicago: From the Great Wall to the Great Lakes
Read MoreWhen two planes hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, Malik Gillani’s world turned upside down.
The information technology consultant who was born in Pakistan and moved to the U.S. went from being someone his clients trusted to someone who frightened them.
Read MoreThere's nothing unusual about a theatre company operating out of a church basement. The genealogy of western theatre is storied with church basements, and on a performative, perhaps even metadramatic level, the union of church and theatre routinely appears in such phenomena as storytelling, ritual, liturgy, and pageantry. Yet despite the seemingly obvious, the relationship between my theatre company, Silk Road Theatre Project, and our hosts at the First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple, where we have been theatre-in-residence since 2004, appears to have penned a whole new storyline in this age old symbiosis.
Read MoreIn-house literature about the production of Pangs of the Messiah says the play presents Israelis and the Middle East conflict in "a myriad of complexities." It is precisely these complexities that hang in the air, like the fallout from a bomb, during Pangs of the Messiah.
Read More