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The Critics Review:
DEADLY SHE-WOLF ASSASSIN
AT ARMAGEDON!
“It is absolutely clear that Fred Ho is a great musician and composer. I felt totally at home with his rambunctious mix of jazz and traditional Japanese music. The score felt like it could have easily accompanied an episode of Cowboy Beebop with its crime jazz sensibility.”
~ Reviewed by Banapana April 29, 2005.
“an action-packed, comic book-style stage show. Thrilling samurai sword fights, dramatic dialogue narrated onstage by the fierce Dawn Akemi Saito, and provocative music performed live by Ho’s dynamic band, combined to create a multifaceted picture that funneled into a plot based on ancient paradigms of loyalty.the script was always fascinating to hear. Ruth Margraff’s phrases shimmered with majestic images and ebbed with the erupting emotions that murmur within the hearts of her characters.In a twist on the original story of ‘Lone Wolf and Cub,’ Margraff provided a female character as the deadly assassin. The She-Wolf often broke into beautiful combative dances, using slinky red scarves or fans as symbols for the tools of death. Fight scenes, choreographed by Tsuyoshi Kaseda, showcased the actor’s exceptional agility and acrobatic skills, especially during one scene in which three fantastically-named young male assassins appeared: Bok Mei Lotus (Satoshi Okabe), Col. Ulysses Sam Armageddon (Takumi Bando), and Qaseem the Killing Machine (Emmanuel Brown). The trio careened onto the stage in a flurry of flipping legs, spinning torsos, and helicopter kicks. Ho’s music often set the direction for the play, warning of danger or the emergence of a new character with changes in speed, volume, and texture. Mixing daredevil jazz with aspects of Asian music, the score took a nostalgic look back at the glamorous, fight-to-the-death heroes from the 1970s espionage pop-culture.the production could very well be a marvel.”
~ Reviewed by Celeste Sunderland, www.dpsny.org, April 15, 2005.
“There’s no better conversation stopper, so beyond comprehension is this fusion of unlikely genres. Yet even in a bare-bones world premiere the vision behind the piece couldn’t have been clearer. Conceived, cowritten and composed by Fred Ho, himself a walking fusion of progressive jazz and cutting-edge classical, Deadly She-Wolf was a paragon of shrewd decisions. In stories that are such uncomplicated morality tales, do audiences necessarily want or need the kind of character depth that sung dialogue offers---or the stage time needed to explore such depths? No. What you do need in a piece like this is an alternate universe. And Deadly She-Wolf, co-written by Ruth Margraff, delivered that essential quality that ironically explored fine lines between things silly and world-ending, shallow comic-book thrills and apocalyptic, Old Testament pronouncements. Fight scenes were absorbing in their strategy and choreographic stylization you have to recognize the fascinating, singular talent of composer Ho. He’s breathtakingly robust, both in the often-atonal jazz sensibility of his baritone saxophone (a wonderfully battle-scarred instrument, from which he led the pit band) and in his vividly textured instrumentation. Acknowledgment of the piece’s Japanese sensibility included the purposeful, even exquisite use of a 20-string koto”.
~ Reviewed by David Patrick Stearns, The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 27, 2006.
“Ho’s musical architecture fuses the pristine tonal landscape of Japanese classical music with ‘70s era progressive jazz. Most impressive was Ho’s delicately austere use of the 20-string koto (played by Yumi Kurosawa), which paints rich cultural vistas, punctuated by pugilistic jazz riffs. The work was a contrast in cultural past and present: It contained elements of Japanese Noh theater and Kung Fu fighting, classical Japanese music and chamber progressive jazz, ritualized storytelling and simple cultural fable, geisha fan dances and feminist warriors. The score involves on every level. During a climactic swordfight, for instance, Ho swings his band out into full staccato structures as potent as cinematic scoring. The aerial layouts, punch-front/back flips, samurai swashbuckling and martial arts exhibitions were equally thrilling. [the work is an example of] a flying cutting edge.”
~ Reviewed by Lewis Whittington, Broad Street Review, July 18, 2006.
