The Kimura family has a spirited son named Sammy, beautifully played and powerfully sung by handsome, awesomely talented Telly Leung, who resents being treated like a criminal by gung-ho American soldiers, stripped of his clothes and dignity, denied medicine, blankets, and healthy food, and forced to live with rats and fleas.

The prisoners tried to assimilate, even formed an all-American baseball team. But their babies died in the severe cold and heat for no reason other than a brand of racism that was never justified. “America is also at war with Italy, but they didn’t lock up Joe DiMaggio,” says Sammy in one of the show’s more poignant outbursts. It’s a good point.

This is a musical? You bet, and a darned passionate one, too. The carefully researched book by Marc Acito, Lorenzo Thione and Jay Kuo, who also supplied the soaring music and intelligent lyrics, collates years of events into a gripping trajectory, while the stirring score perfectly illustrates the action, seamlessly staged by director Stafford Arima.

By 1944, to prove their loyalty and ease tensions for their struggling families, Sammy leads a group of Japanese-American boys who join the Army and form their own fighting unit. (Others were unfairly drafted, even while their families were still jailed.)

Dissent reigns, but Sammy fights to defend the honor of all Japanese-Americans back home while others, including his sister Kei’s boyfriend Frankie Suzuki (an equally fine Michael K. Lee) burns his draft card and is labeled a draft dodger, risking a conviction for treason. Lea Salonga, with a voice clear and sparkling as Baccarat crystal, is the older sister who bridges the gap, maintain peace and stand up for a positive future. When the war was over, the internees were given a bus ticket and $25 each, but between brother and sister, a new war is just beginning that nobody will ever win.