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How a young, queer, Chinese-American charmer from San Francisco is making showtunes exciting again.

Musical theater lovers have been bracing for The End for decades now. Only the cause of death of the great American art form seems to be in doubt: Will overblown special effects (onstage helicopters, indoor sea battles) reduce musicals to cartoon thrill rides? Will huge budgets price out promising new composers, dooming audiences to ever-more-stale revivals and adaptations of summer kids' movies? Will $150 tickets drive the masses home to just watch high-def DVDs?

San Francisco composer Jay Kuo believes it doesn't have to be that way: "I think we need to return to a time and place where we don't need $13 million budgets for shows. Not every show needs to be 'Wicked' or 'Phantom of the Opera,'" he assures.

Kuo is backing up his vision by composing and producing some exciting new musicals of his own. Last summer he sold out a full run of "Insignificant Others," a simply staged but richly conceived musical dramedy about a group of straight and gay friends who move to the City by the Bay looking for romance, at the New Conservatory Theatre. The Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle awarded "Insignificant Others" Best Original Script for a musical honors for 2006.

Kuo followed up just a few months later with the musical "Homeland," a modern Romeo and Juliet story of star-crossed Asian-American and white lovers, which sold out the Magic Theater with an even sparer set and a singularly sensational score. "For 'Homeland,' we did the entire show with two chairs and two boxes on a black stage, with lighting," Kuo described. "We wanted to focus on the music and the lyrics and the book, to show that this sort of medium is powerful enough to stand on its own, and to challenge the audience to use its imagination, rather than feel like you're watching television."

Bay Area theatergoers are proving Kuo right. He's been able to raise enough money between investors and ticket-holders to keep staging new musicals that highlight fresh, compelling content over high production values alone. "I'd like to replicate that formula, both across other geographic areas and in more shows," Kuo says. "The plan is to keep cranking out a show every half-year to a year until I'm dead."

First steps toward Broadway

A very healthy thirty-something gay man, Kuo is unlikely to stop "cranking out" musicals for a good long while. Kuo dropped by the Gay.com offices in San Francisco looking smart, neatly styled, casually metrosexual. He has the self-assured air of the successful San Francisco lawyer he's been, and the sparkling, slightly mischievous smile of the magnetic artist he's becoming.

Photo by Matthew Mattozzi Star-crossed lovers in "Homeland"

Kuo will need his considerable charm to prosper in his new profession. Kuo took a real risk when he stepped off the track to legal partner in 2005 to dedicate himself to a career in the arts. Kuo's choice was bold but no surprise. He'd been playing piano since he was 5, and wrote his first full-length musical -- precociously titled "The Darker Soul" -- in high school. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, Kuo put on his first big amateur productions: "Upwardly Mobile," an original show he wrote himself; and a fully-staged "Evita" with a crew of over 100.

It took a few years and a UC Berkeley law degree before Kuo was ready to go pro as a musical composer-producer. Staging a show of any size costs major money; just covering one's food and rent bills during development strains a working person's budget, especially in hyper-gentrified San Francisco.

Kuo started modestly, with the faith and pluck of a 1940s movie musical character -- "We've got some costumes in the barn, let's put on a show!" He assembled a collection of songs he'd already written, built a solid plot around them, and gathered some performer buddies in a rented church to do a staged reading for about 100 friends and relatives. Kuo also invited every theater professional he could think of that night; representatives of two small theaters showed up, and that proved enough.

One of the small theater reps wrote Kuo a letter of recommendation for a successful grant application to the Jon Sims Center for the Performing Arts, a local organization that supports LGBT community theater. Kuo and company immediately took up residence at the Sims Center for six months, using the freedom from office rent to complete development of the show they'd previewed in the church -- "Insignificant Others." At the end of six months, Kuo staged the full show at the Sims Center, catching the attention of New Conservatory Theatre, which in turn got investors interested.

"It was great to have their name behind us," Kuo said of New Conservatory Theatre, which put the show on their performance schedule that season. "Because they had picked us and we were slotted early in their summer run, I was able to go to investors and pitch the show. That was a big plus." Kuo was on his way.

Investing in the future of musical theater

Who supports musical theater? Kuo found friends and family ready to back him. It didn't hurt that he's a lawyer, with attorney contacts who command serious investment money. Being in San Francisco also gave Kuo access to dot-com millionaires; acquaintances who had cashed out from Google were eager for good venture capital prospects like Kuo's.

Lois Tema Photography Soulful hunk in "Insignificant Others."

Different investors were attracted for different reasons. Kuo's gay backers, especially, were keen to support the queer subject matter of "Insignificant Others." Asian family members knew Kuo was working on "Homeland," and were anxious to see that Asian-American story get on the boards. Others just loved Kuo's work, regardless of the topics addressed. Everyone hoped to see their investment grow.

Did anyone hesitate to lend their name to a gay production? Not really. While some supporters encouraged Kuo expand his scope beyond gay life -- as he's already done with "Homeland," a straight multiracial romance at its heart -- breadth of appeal was a bigger concern, for Kuo as well as for his backers. "It wasn't so much that it's too gay for straight audiences," Kuo said of "Insignificant Others." "It was more a question of, Aren't these themes -- some of them -- a little too outrageous to play outside of San Francisco? ... We want the show to have crossover appeal and be able to reach people who are in 'red state' America, as well."

Kuo changed at least one of the songs in "Insignificant Others" to expand its audience reach. That number started life as "Jesus Freaks," and morphed into the more playful, "Who Would Jesus Hate?" Kuo still pokes fun at religious extremists, but he's toned down some of the vitriol and focused more sharply on self-righteous hypocrisy. "The idea was to talk about religion in a humorous way," Kuo explained. "It was closer to the mark to say that that Jesus wouldn't hate anybody, and to suggest that God hates 'fags' or God hates gay people is just ridiculous, because neither God nor Jesus would."

Some pretty outrageous content still makes it into the show, such as the comic song, "Plumbing." When sweet-as-Splenda 'fag hag' Margaret goes looking for love in San Francisco, she discovers -- not surprisingly -- a lot of men are unavailable to her because they're gay. Margaret becomes totally flummoxed when she finally connects with a man and then discovers he's a pre-operative transsexual who doesn't yet have his new "plumbing." Fortunately for Kuo, audiences laugh along with rhymes like, "missile incoming," "I'm not succumbing" and "With my tranny I'm slumming." It actually turned out to be harder for Kuo to come up with rhymes for another of Margaret's songs, "Heterosexual" -- the lyricist had to stretch for such tongue twisters as "coy intellectual," "other directional" and "out of contextual."

Whether in spite of its racy content or because of it, "Insignificant Others" connected resoundingly with a broad audience, and will return this summer to a larger theater with an expanded cast and new live band. It'll show at Yerba Buena Center's Zeum Theatre, next to the popular Metreon complex. Such high-profile exposure supports Kuo's ambition to take "Insignificant Others" far beyond the San Francisco Bay Area. A New York producer is already planning an Off-Broadway run of the show for next year.

Asian-American "Homeland"

As proudly, openly gay as Jay Kuo is, he hopes to someday be known as a great composer, period. He also can't be pigeon-holed as strictly a "Chinese-American writer," although he embraces his Asian heritage and would be proud to join the celebrated ranks of Asian-American writers like David Henry Hwang and Amy Tan.

Kuo's parents fled mainland China during the Communist Revolution, settling first in Taiwan and then the United States. Much of the family has since returned to Beijing, China, to join the new entrepreneurial society now flourishing there. Kuo's sister owns a yoga studio. One of his brothers was in a very popular Chinese rock band, named Tang Dynasty after a long-ago empire in which great art flourished. "Many Chinese yearn for that time again," Kuo says of the Tang Dynasty period of about 1400 years ago, "where China is at the height of the world's cultural and political power." One wonders what role Kuo and his family might play in a 21st-century Chinese cultural renaissance.

Kuo imagines someday writing a musical about the Tiananmen Square massacre, a "Les Miserables" for China. But don't expect the composer to start courting Hong Kong or Taipei audiences anytime soon. Aside from a few years in Beijing as an adult, Kuo has spent little time outside his native U.S.A. He'll continue writing mainly in English, in American theater style, even when he addresses Asian-American themes, he says.

Still, Kuo unabashedly recognizes the influence of his family's Chinese heritage. "When my parents came over to the United States (in the 1950s), they brought over a lot of cultural baggage with them, and it certainly informed and colored my view of the world," Kuo said. "I understand them very well, and I think there are lot of things they hang onto that are very valuable and very rich."

One specific lesson Kuo learned from his parents was "how the political can affect the personal." The Kuos fled the Chinese Communists, "and their lives were turned upside-down," Kuo said. Jay Kuo went on to study political science at Stanford, and worked as a civil rights lawyer for most of his career until now. As a musical composer, Kuo says he's still exercising those political muscles he inherited from his parents. "I think theater and law are very similar in that they can change society, in different ways," Kuo says. "...Theater has the potential to reach people's emotions and souls in a way that the law and books cannot. Theater offers a way to talk about these difficult things in society -- race, abortion, gay rights -- and this is an opportunity I relish."

Kuo's mother made it into his play, "Homeland." She takes the form of a Korean-American woman who is, Kuo says with tongue in cheek, "a very, very funny character who is very controlling of her children, and constantly disappointed by them!"

In fact, Kuo's parents are hardly disappointed by their increasingly famous son. His mother was "somewhat taken aback" when he announced he was leaving a thriving legal practice to write musical theater, but she eagerly flew across the Pacific Ocean to see the premiere of his "Homeland." Kuo's father responded by asking, "Is this really what you want to do?" "Life is too short, Dad, to do anything else," Kuo responded. "Yes, life is too short," his father agreed. "I'm proud of you."

Father Kuo even responded positively to the gay themes in "Insignificant Others." Kuo had feared the same-sex love story in his show would put his father off, but the elder Kuo reacted simply by saying, "Now I understand you a little better." The younger Kuo was deeply touched. "My father surprises me constantly," he said.

Kuo will likely please his parents again with his next play: "All In." It's about the World Series of Poker, and Kuo hopes to stage it in Las Vegas, after an initial run tentatively scheduled for San Francisco's Magic Theater in January, 2008. Nevada's Sin City is "a magical place in the Asian lexicon," Kuo says. "All In" will likely involve Vegas-style betting by the audience itself, so that each night the public can gamble on which one of several endings the musical will finish with.

Lois Tema Photography Friends & lovers in "Insignificant Others"

After writing the heartrending story of bigotry and loss that is "Homeland," Kuo is enthusiastic to be working on pure entertainment this time out. "It's ironic that at the happiest time in my life I'm writing the saddest show I've ever written," Kuo said. "I want to return to comedy."

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Read our review of "Insignificant Others."

Read our review of "Homeland."