Rick Shiomi has been a playwright for over forty years. His groundbreaking first playYellow Fever, premiered at the Asian American Theater Company in 1982, winning awards and leading to Pan Asian Repertory Theatre’s New York production that same year, which garnered rave reviews in theNew York TimesandNew Yorker.Yellow Feveris now considered a mainstay of the Asian American playwriting canon. Rick Shiomi is the author of over twenty plays and remains very active as a playwright. His most recent plays areFire in the New Worldwhich was produced by Full Circle Theater in 2022 andSecret Warriorsproduced by the History Theatre in March 2025. Fire In the New Worldis the third in his trilogy of plays (includingYellow FeverandRosie’s Cafe) featuring the Japanese Canadian detective Sam Shikaze grappling with post-World War II racism in the Powell Street area of Vancouver, British Columbia. Shiomi's completion of this trilogy is part of his larger plan for a multi-play cycle, “A Hundred Years of the Japanese Canadians, 1890 to 1990,” based on his family’s stories and exploring the Japanese Canadian/American experience from immigration in the 1890s when Shiomi’s grandfather arrived in Vancouver through to the 1980s when the Japanese Canadians received Redress and Reparations from the Canadian government for the great injustices of the internment camps. His most recent playSecret Warriorsis about the Japanese Americans who learned Japanese at the Military Intelligence Services Language School in Minnesota during World War Two and then served as translators, interpreters and interrogators in the Pacific Theater of the war.
A performer and composer, Gary Rue has been playing music for audiences throughout the western hemisphere since the mid-’60s, beginning with various town halls in the upper Midwest and graduating to East Coast “tent” tours that included the Big Apple (Carnegie Hall as music director and duet partner for Gene Pitney) and on to far-flung points in Canada and the Caribbean. Early along the way, Rue began writing music of his own and was rewarded with some of his songs being recorded by (among others) Nick Lowe and Helen Reddy, as well as many prominent regional artists. He is the author of nearly 80 scores for music theatre, including The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fair(l)y (Stoopid) Tales, which toured the U.S. and China with Dallas Children’s Theater. Rue is also a 2010 Minnesota Music Hall of Fame inductee and an active touring musician and educator.
