Two new Broadway musicals this week, but at today’s budget-blasting ticket prices, only one is worth the money. The rousing new musical Allegiance has an original book, original score, and fresh, original ideas—qualities so unusual in a market overcrowded with stale revivals that attention must be paid. See it and cheer.

Based on the actual experiences he and his family endured when they were locked up in U.S. concentration camps during World War II, political activist and actor George Takei, best known as Mr. Sulu on Star Trek, is the inspiration for this deeply touching saga. He plays the wise patriarch of an honest, hard-working clan of immigrant farmers in the John Steinbeck region of Northern California whose homes were confiscated by a decree from President Franklin Roosevelt that rounded up 120,000 innocent Japanese citizens, robbed them of their possessions, clothes, businesses and money, and evacuated them to forced labor prisons in Arkansas, Wyoming and California where they were subjected to harsh punishments that have left a blight on American human relations to this day.