ON STAGE
KUMU KAHUA
Lylas (Meredith Desha) snags a big one in Kayden Asiu (Jason Kanda) in "Ulua."
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New 'Ulua' looks to be improvement
CALL IT "Ulua: The Musical 2.0." Kumu Kahua artistic director Harry Wong says that the group's current revival of the Lee Cataluna/Sean T.C. O'Malley musical is significantly different from the version that was originally staged at McKinley High School in 1999.
"It's a different cast, and things that Lee and Sean wanted to change are being changed about the play and about the music. At McKinley, you could really use those huge ulua (fishing) poles, but in Kumu's space we can't, so we're 'theatricalizing' it," Wong explained last weekend.
"Ulua: The Musical"
» Place: Kumu Kahua Theatre, 46 Merchant St.
» Time: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays, through Feb. 12
» Tickets: $5 to $16
» Call: 536-4441
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Other changes include new choreography by Nara Conaty that replaces the original work of Pam Sandridge, costuming by Alvin Chan in place of the original creations of Puamana Crabbe, and a new set suitable for the smaller theater. There are no returning original cast members either.
Wong replaces R. Kevin Doyle as director. He and Doyle talked about some of the things Doyle didn't have time to fully develop back then.
"It's been a little bit more updated ... and there's one scene that's done as a flashback, and we're focusing it around the tensions that are developing between the unmarried couples. In figuring out that tension, we're bringing it up a little bit more, and the initial Maui vs. Oahu kind of thing that goes on is heightened a bit more (and) the possible burgeoning relationship between the boy from Honolulu and the girl from Maui."
The boy is Kayden Asiu, who drops out of the University of Hawaii, leaves his girlfriend Lylas, and gets a job building rock walls on Maui. Two of the wall-builders introduce Kayden to the male-bonding experience of ulua fishing. One of the other guys is hesitant to commit to his own girlfriend (an underdeveloped subplot in the 1999 version involved Kayden's latent interest in her).
With a protagonist named Kayden Asiu, much of the comedy is basic by-the-numbers stuff. (Try say da name out loud if you no awredy get da joke!) Cataluna's use of fishing as a metaphor for sex, however, was more imaginative and worked well the first time around.
I described the original "Ulua" as "a promising premise awaiting further development" when it was reviewed in '99. If all goes well, this 2.0 version should be a significant upgrade.