Rick Shiomi (born May 25, 1947)Biography and Genealogy Master Index. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, Cengage Learning. 1980- 2009. is a Japanese Canadian playwright, stage director, artistic director and taiko artist. Considered a major player in the Asian American/Canadian theatre movement, he is best known for his groundbreaking play Yellow Fever, which earned him the Bay Area Theater Circle Critics Award and “Bernie” Award. Over the last couple decades, Shiomi has also become an artistic and stage director. He directed the world premiere of the play Caught by Christopher Chen for which he received the Philadelphia Barrymore Award Nomination for Outstanding Direction. He is currently the Co-Artistic Director of Full Circle Theater Company located in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Career Shiomi's Yellow Fever premiered at the Asian American Theater Company in 1982, winning awards, and leading to Pan Asian Repertory Theatre's New York production, garnering rave reviews in the New York Times and New Yorker. Yellow Fever is now considered a mainstay of the Asian American playwriting canon, and Shiomi is now the author of over twenty plays. As a stage director, he has discovered remarkable new plays and re-imagined classics in the context of the Asian American experience. He directed the world premiere of Caught, by Christopher Chen, at InterAct Theatre for which he received a Barrymore Award Nomination for Outstanding Direction and the play received the Outstanding New Play Award. (Caught went on to many other productions across the country, winning several awards including the 2013 Obie for Best New Play for its NYC production.) Shiomi's re-imagining of The Mikado, reset in Edwardian England, attracted considerable national interest and press coverage, with Asian American actors playing many English lead characters, wiping out all the problematic Asian stereotypes. Shiomi has staged over forty productions for theater companies across North America, and he re-staged Caught for Full Circle Theater at the Guthrie Theater's Dowling Studio in May/June 2019.
Shiomi has had a strong impact on Asian American theater in other significant ways. A co-founder of Mu Performing Arts in Minnesota in 1992, he was artistic director from 1993 to 2013, developing Mu into a major Asian American theater company in the US. At Mu he mentored hundreds of artists, and produced scores of world premieres as well as Asian American classics. Shiomi was a founding member of CAATA, the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists, the national service organization for Asian American theaters and artists. Recognition for his work includes the McKnight Distinguished Artist Award, the Ivey Award For Lifetime Achievement, and the Sally Ordway Irvine Award for Vision. Since leaving Mu in 2014 to pursue other artistic interests, he has directed for InterAct Theater in Philadelphia, and co-founded Full Circle Theater Company in Minneapolis/St. Paul, where he serves as Co-Artistic Director and continues to expand his artistic horizons with Full Circle's mission of multiracial theater focusing on equity, diversity, and inclusion. And in 2018, he completed a multi-year Doris Duke Charitable Foundation project in Philadelphia in its Building Demand for the Arts program (implementation round) working closely with InterAct Theatre to build an Asian American theater presence in Philadelphia. His new play, Fire In The New World, was work-shopped in Tokyo in 2019.
Playwright Rick Shiomi began his theater career in San Francisco, California at the Asian American Theater Company where his first play Yellow Fever was produced in 1982, for which he received the 1982 Bay Area Theater Circle Critics Award and a “Bernie” for new play from the San Francisco Chronicle. He later moved to New York City where the play was produced by the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre and then had a successful off-Broadway run. The Pan Asian Repertory Theatre produced several of his plays, including a prequel to Yellow Fever titled Rosie's Cafe and a sequel, Once is Never Enough, co-authored with Marc Hayashi and Lane Kiyomi Nishikawa.
Yellow Fever remains a classic in the canon of the Asian American/Canadian theatre movement. His other important early works include Rosie's Cafe, Play Ball, and Uncle Tadao.
Play Ball was produced at Pan Asian Repertory and Uncle Tadao was produced at both East West Players in Los Angeles and the Asian American Theater Company. Rosie's Cafe has been toured across Canada and the United States. Both Rosie’s Cafe and Yellow Fever have been produced in Japanese (translations by Toyoshi Yoshihara) in Tokyo, Japan.
From 1993 to 2013 Shiomi wrote a number of plays for Mu Performing Arts while he was Artistic Director there. The first of these was Mask Dance, based upon the stories of young Korean adoptees who were early participants in the company. Mask Dance incorporated a traditional performance form, Korean mask dance, into a contemporary Asian American story. Other plays written in this style were Song of the Pipa and The Tale of the Dancing Crane. Shiomi works almost entirely behind the scenes, or behind a taiko drum, but with the play The Tale of the Dancing Crane, he took center stage as an actor. He shared a traditional Japanese story of losing one precious thing to find something better and combined it with his own story of discovering taiko. Shiomi co-wrote the play The Walleye Kid with Sundraya Kase, which he adapted from a traditional Japanese fable titled Peach Boy, and the play was produced in 1999. The original story tells of a Japanese child who is found inside a peach and adopted by the old couple that discovered him. In The Walleye Kid, Shiomi has moved the setting from the warmer climate of Japan to the icy winters of Minnesota where the baby emerges from a giant Walleye. In this play, he explores what Asian, specifically Korean, adoptees have experienced as they adapt to life in America. Walleye Kid, The Musical, which Shiomi adapted from the play, was most recently produced in 2008 by Mu Performing Arts at the McKnight Theatre of the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts. In 2002, he co-authored Hmong Tiger Tales with Cha Yang, which was co-produced at the Weyerhaeuser Auditorium by Mu Performing Arts and St. Paul's Steppingstone Theatre For Youth.
Mu Performing Arts While in Minnesota as a visiting lecturer, Shiomi found an emerging Asian American community and a well-developed general theater scene. He also met his future wife Martha Johnson who, along with others, helped him co-found Theater Mu.Lin, Lynda. “Rick Shiomi helms the fourth largest APA theater company in the U.S. in a state where ice fishing is a favorite pastime. Pacific Citizen. February 1, 2008. He served as the Artistic Director there for twenty years. During that time he developed the company from an annual budget of $20,000 to over $500,000 and was involved in the development of many emerging Asian American theater artists. He selected and produced the early plays of such prominent national playwrights as Lauren Yee, Julia Cho and Michael Golamco and local writers as Katie Ka Vang, Sun Mee Chomet, Katie Hae Leo and May Lee Yang. He also oversaw the development of many actors such as Eric Sharp, Sherwin Resurreccion, Katie Bradley, Sara Ochas and Kurt Kwan who now work regularly at theaters in the Twin Cities.
In 1997 Shiomi founded Mu Daiko, and was the artistic director, lead instructor, composer and player through 2010. The taiko group was so successful that in early 2000s the name Theater Mu was changed to Mu Performing Arts to recognize the fact of the two performing groups within the one company. Shiomi retired from active taiko performing in 2010, and the leadership of Mu Daiko was taken over by Iris Shiraishi, one of Shiomi's first students, and then in 2015 by Jennifer Weir. In 2017 the two groups, Theater Mu and Mu Daiko, officially separated, and Mu Daiko became a new entity, Ensō Daiko part of TaikoArts Midwest under the leadership of Jennifer Weir.
Stage director Shiomi began to develop his unique directorial approach during his first decade as artistic director of Mu Performing Arts when he directed several new, experimental works derived from deep personal narratives of the Asian American experience that were combined with traditional dance, music, or theater methods from related root Asian cultures. He used this unique directing approach with such original works as Mask Dance (1993), combining personal stories of Korean adoptees in America with traditional Korean mask dance; or in Song of the Pipa (2000), combining master Chinese pipa player Gao Hong's wrenching immigrant story with her magnificent live performance as a musician.
This work as stage director at Mu moved forward when Shiomi expanded this approach with his re-imagining of classic western works from an Asian American perspective. This began in 2006 with his acclaimed re-envisioning of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in 19th Century Japan and featuring a mostly Asian American cast. For the production all characters in the fairy world performed in Korean mask dance style, wearing traditional Korean costume.
Shiomi has continued with this innovative approach of re-envisioning western classics from an Asian American perspective. In 2012 he directed Sondheim's musical Into The Woods setting it in Japanese, Korean, Hmong, and Filipino magical folk tale worlds. In 2013 he directed a revolutionary version of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado (co-produced by Skylark Opera), setting it in Edwardian England instead of Japan, and casting Asian American actors (as English men/women) in most of the lead roles, turning the racist depiction of Japanese on its head and receiving national coverage. In 2014 he directed Sondheim's A Little Night Music, using color conscious casting to reframe the musical with an Asian American cast. And he has directed two David Henry Hwang plays, Yellow Face and Hwang's revision of Flower Drum Song by Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Since leaving Mu Performing Arts in 2014, Shiomi has continued his important work as a director: In 2014 he directed the world premiere of Caught by Christopher Chen, at InterAct Theatre, Philadelphia, for which he received the Philadelphia Barrymore Award Nomination for Outstanding Direction. In 2015/16, Shiomi directed Theater: A Sacred Passage for the new theater company he has co-founded, Full Circle Theater. This original/devised performance piece presents the powerful personal narratives of five racially diverse Full Circle theater artists and how they discovered their passion to pursue theater as a profession. In 2017 Shiomi directed: You For Me For You by Mia Chung, at InterAct Theatre, Philadelphia. In 2017 he co-directed 365 Days/365 Plays by Suzan Lori Parks for Full Circle, which received year-end accolades from several media reviewers.
Shiomi has also directed at the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco, InterAct Theatre in Philadelphia, The Bloomington Civic Theatre in Minnesota, St. Paul's SteppingStone Theatre for Youth, and Theatre Esprit Asia in Denver.
Taiko artist and Mu Daiko