Bruce Lee was famous for his precision — you don’t deliver blows and kicks like that without finely calibrating them.
But the new fightsical “Kung Fu” is a hot mess. Penned by David Henry Hwang — a playwright long fascinated by culture shock (“M. Butterfly,” “Chinglish”) — the show flails every which way without connecting.
Though star Cole Horibe (“So You Think You Can Dance”) moves with a silky fluidity, Hwang’s description of Lee as a modern-age icon is as heavy-handed as the action numbers are light-footed. We first meet Lee (Horibe) as a cocky 18-year-old trying to pick up a Japanese-American student (Kristen Faith Oei) in a Seattle dance studio. She likes Martha Graham; he was the 1958 cha-cha champ in Hong Kong. See? Culture clash!
And so it goes as we follow Lee for the next dozen years, when he starts teaching his own kung fu style, marries one of his students, Linda (Phoebe Strole), and in the mid-’60s becomes the first major Asian-American screen star as Kato in “The Green Hornet.”
Under Leigh Silverman’s static direction, these moments plod along. And some of the colorblind casting is puzzling: What’s the point, exactly, of having James Coburn played by the African-American Clifton Duncan, or (white) producer William Dozier by Asian-American Peter Kim?
Throughout, Lee is haunted by the presence of his father, Lee Hoi-Chuen (Francis Jue), a Peking Opera and film actor. But Horibe isn’t good enough to stand up to the experienced Jue. Even the young Bradley Fong makes more of an impression battling Jue — and he’s playing Bruce at age 8.
Then again, even a seasoned actor would struggle with graveside lines like, “Maybe if we hadn’t fought so much, Father, we could’ve enjoyed our time together.”
Horibe — who, frankly, takes far too long to take his shirt off — is more in his element fight-dancing. Or is that dance-fighting?
Set to catchy vintage soul-jazz tunes, those scenes are handled by fight director Emmanuel Brown and “So You Think You Can Dance” choreographer Sonya Tayeh, and they’re a lot more fun than the dramatic ones. Yet you also wish they kicked more butt.
And that’s a big problem for a martial-arts show.