Jamie Ford’s best-selling novel Hotel On the Corner of Bitter and Sweet has been adapted into a staged musical, a collaboration between Broadway veteran Lainie Sakakura and composer Paul Fujimoto. On May 23 and 24, they presented a sneak preview of the show with new music and extra songs.
For this musical, director Sakakura based her book on Ford’s story of Chinese American boy Henry, a 12-year-old in 1942 wartime Seattle, who loves jazz and later connects with the only other Asian child at school, a Japanese American girl named Keiko.
As a composer, Fujimoto reports that he had long been aware of Sakakura’s work on Broadway. “She was one of the only Japanese names I ever saw listed in Broadway Playbills and CD booklets, so naturally I was intrigued,” he recounted. “I even had a poster of her and her husband Alex performing in Fosse taped to the wall of my bedroom, long before I knew them.”
The two met during a performance at the Harvard Club of New York. “Somehow I knew I had to tell her about this amazing novel I had just read,” Fujimoto mused.
Sakakura quickly took to the idea of developing an adaptation of Bitter and Sweet, and the pair set out to secure the rights. Once permissions were in place, Fujimoto says the creativity began to flow. “In terms of writing the score, the song ideas came fast and furious,” he recalled. “The novel just sings.”
Despite the lyrical nature of the book, the two adult artists found it challenging to write from the perspective of a child. What helped was letting Ford’s story guide their way. “A few hooks were inspired directly by lines from the book, such as the line about Keiko being Henry’s ‘lighthouse’ becoming the song Lost Ships,” Fujimoto elaborated.
And when Fujimoto finds his own compositional ship going off-course, he discovers that his partnership with Sakakura helps him course-correct. “I think every writer wrestles with the temptation to make their work as complex and challenging as possible,” Fujimoto said. “Lainie has to remind me from time to time to ‘keep it simple, stupid.’”
For the recent May performances, Fujimoto chose to add instrumentals beyond just a piano and drums, including orchestrations for a six-piece band, and the duo was delighted to present this expanded work at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute. “Langston is a great venue for this performance,” Fujimoto explained. “The acoustics are superb, and the stage is wide and spacious yet still intimate.”
Fujimoto and Sakakura were excited for audiences to hear the new work, and now they have their eyes toward the future, seeking to attract a theatre company to produce a full mainstage production. “At first, I think Lainie and I had the mindset of ‘New York or Bust,’” Fujimoto admitted. “But now we realize that, since this is a Seattle story, it deserves to premiere in Seattle.”
