Puppet Adjacent - Kennedy Kanagawa '00 - Nishimachi alumnus makes his Broadway debut with a graceful touch of physical theater

Michael S. Strickland
The Internationalist Fall/Spring 2022-2023 Vol 69

Partnering with a Puppet

“Because the cow is held at a distance from me, it’s a weight that’s not centered within my body, so it becomes a strain after a while.”

Kennedy Kanagawa is explaining how, while relatively light at fifteen pounds, the puppet of the cow Milky White he maneuvers around the stage in his Broadway debut does get a bit heavy, especially with the energetic choreography and emotional liveliness he imparts to it for almost three hours every night as part of the recent revival of Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical collage of European fairy tales.  

“So usually I have physical therapy first thing in the morning,” Kennedy continues, “and then go to rehearsal for a different show I’m helping to develop, and then I leave that a little early to make it to the evening performance of Into the Woods, and then I come home and pass out and do it all over again the next day.”

Into the Woods

One day, Jack, a poor peasant who will eventually get rich by stealing from the “giants in the sky,” is told by his mother to go “into the woods to sell the cow” he considers his “best friend in the whole world” — Milky White — since she has stopped giving milk, and, anyway, as his mother sings, “no one keeps a cow for a friend.”

Kennedy deftly expresses the vicissitudes of this friendship between man and cow by having the puppet gaze soulfully at Jack, who returns the affection by petting Milky White’s happy head and gazing into her epoxy-coated styrofoam eyes. In an ensemble sequence of the title song, Kennedy has Milky White crouch and shiver to share in the trepidation all the characters onstage feel about going “into the woods” to fulfill their various quests.

After Jack sells Milky White to the baker and his wife (who, for their own reasons, are seeking “a cow as white as milk”) for five beans, Kennedy has the puppet (who hangs her head sadly and lies down, tearfully gazing after the departing Jack) buck up her spirits, gaze quizzically at her new companions and playfully cavort with them, adding a new dimension to their duet “It Takes Two.” And then there’s the prancing joy Milky White shows when reunited with Jack… Kennedy expresses all this and more with such dynamic verve and audience-delighting agility that it seems that the puppet created by James Ortiz must surely be lighter than a feather.

The heaviest part of Milky White, Kennedy clarifies, is the head, which has a handle he holds with his right hand. This handle is equipped with a lever to open and close the mouth. With his left hand he holds a handle on the rump of the cow. “She’s made of corrugated cardboard, and her legs are tied on with rope joints. She’s light enough to be usable, but it’s more the weight of the head on its own, which is the part I’m holding without the support of the legs, that makes it very physically taxing.”

Fast and Furious  

Great artists have a gift for making the difficult seem easy; Kennedy is no exception, making his Broadway debut, at the age of 37, seem as effortless as he does his debut as a puppeteer.

Scheduled initially to run May 4–15, 2022, at New York City Center as part of its Encores! series, this production of Into the Woods, directed by Lear deBessonet and choreographed by Lorin Latarro, “was a very fast and furious process,” says Kennedy, “since it was only a two-week run, and ten days of rehearsal to mount the entire thing.” Ortiz, the show’s puppet designer and director, is a friend Kennedy “collaborated with on previous projects,” he explains. “We’ve done some stuff that was very physical theater, which kind of feels puppet adjacent. He messaged me, saying, ‘Are you free in May? You can probably do this, right?’ I replied, ‘I don’t know — we’ll see.’ I had never puppeteered before, so it was all a very fast learning curve.”

In a couple of days Kennedy and Ortiz figured out what the puppet was capable of. “It’s a unique puppet,” says Kennedy. “It’s not like a sock puppet or a marionette where there’s an established way of using it.” For instance, they tried different degrees of head-tilt and mouth-openings to figure out how to convey different emotions. They also learned how to use gravity to make her walk. “If we swing her head this way,” Kennedy explains, “her legs move forward, and then you can pull up her back legs and give her a walking cadence.”

Kennedy learned how to combine these movements and emotions and make Milky White dance. “I remember a specific instance in the opening number. The choreographer said, ‘All right, now, people, at this point you’re going to go, Step, step, chassé, and then do a three-step turn.’ I wondered, ‘How does a four-legged puppet of a cow chassé?’ But I figured out something, and looked off to the side where James was sitting, and he gave a thumbs up. So, yeah, it was a fast and furious process, but very fun.”

The fast furious fun did not end when the two-week run at City Center ended, however; the show proved to be so popular that it soon transferred to the St. James Theatre on Broadway, where it was initially slated to run from July 10 through August 21, 2022 — but then was extended through mid-October — and extended again through January 8, 2023. “But that is our final extension,” says Kennedy. “Lin-Manuel Miranda’s new show is literally coming in to the theater the next day, so there’s no way we’d be able to extend after that.” (Lin-Manuel Miranda, by the way, is the creator, among other things, of the musical Hamilton.)

Beginnings

Kennedy’s path to his first Broadway show began long before he and James Ortiz started working together to bring a cow puppet to life on stage — and also involved putting himself into the mind and manner of another animal. “My very first theatrical experience was in third grade at Nishimachi,” Kennedy says. “I was in a play called How the Armadillo Came to Be, directed by Mr. Matz. I played the Jaguar, I think; that was very fun.”

Based on one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, “The Beginning of the Armadillos,” How the Armadillo Came to Be tells how Stickly-Prickly Hedgehog and Slow-and-Solid Tortoise outwit the Jaguar by joining together to form a new animal, the Armadillo, in which their individual strengths are combined, their individual weaknesses overcome, so that they “will never ever be in danger again” — a symbiotic ideal which resonates strongly with Tané Matsukata’s vision of Nishimachi as a place of sharing and collaborative learning in a culture promoting uniqueness, diversity, and mutual respect combined with a guiding hope that the horrors of war will never again be repeated.

Although Kennedy attended Nishimachi from kindergarten through fourth grade, he admits to not quite remembering Miss. Matsukata’s philosophy of education. “But it must have been a good one,” he adds, “because I really felt that I was in good hands. I loved school at Nishimachi. It was such a wonderful place. I remember it as a very warm, safe, supportive environment.”

It was during his final year in this warm, safe, supportive environment that Kennedy got a chance to do his first musical, playing Rosie’s younger brother Chicken Soup in Maurice Sendak and Carole King’s Really Rosie. “The whole class took part,” Kennedy recalls. “Christopher Bjork, who was our fourth grade teacher, directed. I’ve pretty much been performing ever since.”

Muscling through Adolescence

In the summer before he entered fifth grade, Kennedy moved with his mother Diane Wiltshire, his younger brother Kane, and his step-sister Jessica, to the Washington D.C. area. The move was not an easy one for him. “At Nishimachi,” he recalls, “I was so fortunate to have had such a great education, with so much diversity and inclusion. I felt very close to and connected with all of the kids in my class. So coming to the States was just a whole different experience; it was so traumatic. People being judged negatively for any differences, for not conforming, was a brand new concept for me.”

Fortunately, Kennedy found relief from the in-school trauma in both his family and in the form of after-school activities where his perceived differences were welcomed as strengths rather than spurned as oddities. “I started taking dance classes and voice lessons and acting classes,” he recalls. “I think, honestly, it was in part a tactic my mom was using to get me to stop hating being in America and just distract me with classes.” But by the time Kennedy entered middle school, “the bullying was really just out of control,” he says. “But that was also when I started to travel back and forth between Virginia and New York City.”

In New York, Kennedy had landed his first professional role onstage as Jason in the National Asian-American Theater Company’s 1998 revival of Falsettoland, a musical by William Finn and James Lapine. He next performed in A Christmas Carol for two seasons at Madison Square Garden. As he was still a minor, Kennedy was always accompanied by his mother. “She would sublet an apartment in New York,” Kennedy explains, “and we would be there for however long the contract was for. So we did a lot of commuting and I basically did remote schooling with whatever school I was enrolled in at the time.” His very supportive brother and sister also enjoyed traveling with Kennedy on these trips.

When it was time to enter high school, Kennedy thought that perhaps he was missing out by not being socialized with his peers. “I went back into public school for the beginning of high school,” he recalls. “It turns out it was a mistake, because I got picked on very badly. My mother said, ‘Maybe it’s the school.’ So I transferred to a private high school. And that was slightly better. But then I got very sick my junior year — I was bedridden for most of it — and I ended up homeschooling again. Then, for senior year, the private school I was at didn’t take my credits. So I ended up going to a different private school. So, from fifth grade to twelfth grade I went to six different schools. It was very much kind of like muscling through adolescence to get to college because my parents kept saying, ‘Once you get to college, things will be a lot better, we promise.’ Thankfully that turned out to be true.”

Better Things

Kennedy earned his bachelor of arts in theater from Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where his training extended beyond acting to incorporate both dance and singing. While there he performed in such standards as Tommy, Cabaret, and Jesus Christ Superstar, as well as more recent pieces such as Phyllis Nagy’s Weldon Rising and Zanna, Don’t!, a musical fairy tale by Tim Acito and Alexander Dinelaris.

Before going on to college, however, at age 15 Kennedy flew back to Tokyo for his class’s ninth-grade graduation at Nishimachi. “This was before social media,” Kennedy says, “so I hadn’t been able to keep in contact with all of my friends from Nishimachi as much as I would have wanted to. Seeing them again was really special. It felt so easy to slip back into that world.” Especially given the difficult process of adjusting and adapting that coming to the States had demanded of him.

Laughing, Kennedy explains the interesting, contradictory “struggle of othering and being othered across different cultures and countries that a lot of half-Asian people navigate to a degree. When I was at Nishimachi, other kids thought of me as the American kid, but then, when I moved to the States, I was considered the Japanese kid!”

Kennedy was born in Tokyo, and his father, Mike Kanagawa, was a businessman in New York for many years before returning to his native Japan, where he remains unwaveringly proud and supportive of Kennedy’s theatrical endeavors. His mother Diane is, as Kennedy says, “a white lady from Mississippi.” When Kennedy and his family lived in Japan, they lived in Minami Azabu, a short walk from Nishimachi. When asked if Nishimachi’s culture of inclusion and diversity helped him better survive the social adversity he encountered after moving to the United States, Kennedy laughs and replies, “I don’t know if I was able to use any specific tools from Nishimachi to combat the toxicity of the American school system — but I sure did miss it.”

Fun Little Reunions

In November 2021, Kennedy played the role of Lo in the world premiere at the Utah Shakespeare Festival of Jason Ma’s Gold Mountain. “It’s such a beautiful piece,” Kennedy says of this musical that he chose over the role of Jack he was offered in a different revival of Into the Woods that was produced around the same time in Austin, Texas. “It was so special being a part of it. It’s about the Chinese immigrants who built the western section of the Transcontinental railroad and the horrible work conditions that they were placed in and the racism that they faced. It’s a really moving musical, and it had an all-Asian cast, except for one white actor who played the foreman, but everyone else was Asian. And the entire creative team was Asian, and that is such a rare experience within the theater industry in the States. Being a part of that, and telling this story which is so rooted in the Asian American experience was really powerful, and I’m so grateful that I was part of it. And it was just the most wonderful group of people.”

For instance, the writer and composer Jason Ma played the role of Marvin, father of the character played by Kennedy, in the 1998 production of Falsettoland, and the director of Gold Mountain, Alan Muraoka, also directed Falsettoland. And speaking of Falsettoland, Kennedy adds, “Ann Harada, who played my mother in that musical, and is a Japanese American actress, is in Into the Woods with me now. She’s playing Jack’s mother. So both of these shows have been fun little reunions of sorts.”

Celebrating Diversity

Before landing his Broadway debut, Kennedy spent fourteen years working as a restaurant server to support himself. During that time, he continued to audition and perform in theater productions and concerts. He recalls one audition in particular. “There’s a table of white men saying something like, ‘Oh, you’re not Asian enough to be in the Asian show, but you’re not white enough to be in the white show.’ That was a struggle, dealing with and figuring that out.”

Kennedy almost gave up the struggle several times during those years, but he kept working hard and persevering, eventually making his Broadway dream come true by landing a role in a production that’s both technically innovative and socially progressive, putting paid to “certain problematic tropes,” as Kennedy calls them, that need never again be performed. By contrast, Kennedy explains, “The production of Into the Woods I’m in right now,” Kennedy explains, “is a poster child for how shows should be. It’s a really beautiful celebration of diversity onstage. I’ve had little kids come up to me after a show and say, ‘I’ve never seen anyone onstage that looked like me before. I think I want to do theater now!’ That’s been really rewarding.”