A stage actor of long standing, trained in New York and formed on Broadway, who has spent five decades on screen as elders, officers and businessmen, parts that rarely ask for what he can do. The theatre is where the work has been.
Fi1m perspective
Elder. Uncle. 'Painless' Kumagai. Run a finger down Sab Shimono's screen credits and the parts announce themselves by function before they have names: the Japanese businessman, the military officer, the old man at the edge of the frame who knows something. It is a career of dozens of films and television episodes, and in most of them he is there to be looked at for a moment and then left. The two we have reviewed make the point. In Presumed Innocent (1990) he is Kumagai, in a courtroom mystery we admire; in Waterworld (1995) he is a man called Elder, in a floating spectacle we half admire. Neither is his film.
That is a waste of some serious training. He studied at Berkeley and with Stella Adler in New York, and he began on the stage: Ito in Mame (1966), his Broadway debut, opposite Angela Lansbury, then Manjiro in the original Pacific Overtures (1976), which he came back to for the 2004 revival. He moved into film and television in the 1970s in character parts and never stopped, but he never left the theatre either, working with the Asian American company East West Players and, again and again, with the playwright Philip Kan Gotanda on plays about Japanese American families. The year to look at is 1990, when he played Nobu Matsumoto in Gotanda's The Wash on stage, Hiroshi Kawamura in Come See the Paradise, a film about the internment, and Kumagai for Alan J. Pakula, all in the same twelve months.
The stage roles are where critics have found the depth; the screen roles are where they have found the ceiling. Shimono has said so himself, more plainly than we would dare: "I have been acting a lot, but the material has not been too good. The characters have been very one-dimensional." That was 1991, with Presumed Innocent just behind him, and it is hard to argue with. We felt it most in Waterworld, where a man who had originated a Sondheim role is billed as Elder, one word, no name, and we were irritated on his behalf in a film that built a floating city for real and could not spare its supporting cast a name.
The one screen part that has lasted is a voice. As Uncle in Jackie Chan Adventures (2000), across five seasons, he had time, and a character the audience got to know, which is more than most of his live-action work allowed. The pattern is not his doing. Casting has tended to put Asian actors in a group and hand out the officers and the businessmen, and Shimono has taken the work and gone looking for the heart in it, whether or not the writing put one there. If you want to see what the Adler training was for, you will have to go to the theatre, or to the films about the internment. On screen he has been reliably present and seldom required, and the fault is not in the actor.
Biography
Sab Shimono is an American actor of Japanese descent. Born Saburo Shimono on 31 July 1937 in Sacramento, California, he began his career on Broadway and in regional theatre, appearing in musicals including Mame (1966) and Pacific Overtures (1976).
He has worked extensively in film and television in supporting and character roles. His film credits include Midway (1976), Gung Ho (1986), Presumed Innocent (1990) as the coroner 'Painless' Kumagai, Waterworld (1995), and Southland Tales (2006). Television appearances encompass episodes of The X-Files, Seinfeld, Mad Men, and The Blacklist, while voice roles include characters in Avatar: The Last Airbender and Jackie Chan Adventures.
