Hwang (and interviewers) still beating on original "Flower Drum" ...
Beb11572
in the past three years) ever *saw* the original version of FLOWER DRUM SONG.
I also wonder how many people have been automatically soured on it; who would
now avoid a production (or watching the movie) of the Hammerstein/Fields
version like the plague, because they have been brainwashed by all the negative
remarks of Hwang and his like-minded interviewers:
This 'Flower' blossoms
Revival of '50s musical finds a new and truer voice
By EVERETT EVANS
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle
If we want to make something new, we first have to love what is old."
Brad Loper /
Dallas Morning News
David Henry Hwang drew a Tony nomination for his new book for Flower Drum Song.
That line from David Henry Hwang's "revisal" of Flower Drum Song expresses the
challenge facing the musical's characters, who strive to honor their cultural
heritage while forging new lives as Chinese-Americans in 1950s San Francisco.
It also captures the achievement of Hwang and his collaborators, who rethought
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's 1958 hit -- which now strikes many as
dated or patronizing -- while retaining the virtues that made it worthwhile in
the first place.
The new Flower Drum Song makes its Houston debut Saturday at the Hobby Center
for the Performing Arts in a regional re-creation of last season's Broadway
revival. Co-producing are Houston's Theatre Under The Stars, Dallas Summer
Musicals, Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre and Sacramento's California Musical
Theatre.
Houston audiences will see the Broadway sets, costumes, direction and
choreography. New York leading man Jose Llana re-creates his role as Ta, with
others reprising roles they played or understudied there.
In its original production and 1961 film version, Flower Drum Song drew
favorable but not rave reviews and enjoyed modest success. Yet it suffered by
comparison to Rodgers and Hammerstein's previous projects: Oklahoma!, Carousel,
South Pacific and The King and I were not only bigger hits but also
groundbreakers in the musical form. Flower Drum Song also would be overshadowed
by The Sound of Music, which, though never a critical favorite, turned out to
be the team's final collaboration and biggest commercial success.
Despite an appealing score and perennial themes of cultural and generational
conflict, Flower Drum Song lapsed into neglect, becoming the only R&H hit no
one wanted to revive.
Hwang, who won a Tony for M. Butterfly and Obies for FOB and Golden Child,
recognized the show's importance while acknowledging mixed feelings toward it.
"It still is the only major musical about Asian-Americans," Hwang says. "And
the movie was the only film from a major U.S. studio about and starring
Asian-Americans until The Joy Luck Club in 1993."
The few other musicals (Miss Saigon, Pacific Overtures) or movies (Sayonara)
with leading Asian characters depicted them in their homelands, not addressing
the theme of assimilation into American life, which Hwang stressed.
"The movie was important to me as a Chinese-American growing up in Los Angeles
in the 1960s," Hwang says. "When it would turn up on the late show, it was the
only time I'd see Asians depicted on TV as regular people, with a younger
generation and a love story between an Asian man and Asian woman. Not to
mention that they were all singing and dancing to this great music. Virtually
every other depiction of Asians up to that point was inhuman -- either
inhumanly bad like Fu Manchu or inhumanly good like the detective Charlie Chan.
"As a kid, I loved (the movie). But as a college student in the late '70s -- at
a time when Asians and other minorities had begun to write about their own
experiences and reject depictions created by others -- I felt there were things
in the original that seemed clichéd and stereotypical."
In the 1950s, simply telling a story of decent, likable Asian-Americans --
virtually all played by the genuine article, rather than Caucasian actors in
heavy makeup -- seemed a step forward.
But in recent years, heightened sensitivity has become a prerequisite in the
depiction of ethnic minorities. Flower Drum Song's approach to its characters
and their customs had become cute, even quaint. Such cultural dislocations as
Wang's hostility to modern ways and Mei Li's docile naiveté while confronting
new surroundings sometimes seemed played for easy laughs.
Yet even as Hwang and his college peers rejected depictions of Asians by
outsiders as inauthentic, Flower Drum Song maintained a certain pull.
"Even among those who objected to it," Hwang says, "if you'd take them aside,
they'd often admit that they sort of liked the movie. For many of us, it
remained a guilty pleasure."
In 1996, Hwang approached the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization with the
idea of writing a new book for Flower Drum Song, to replace the original by
Hammerstein and Joseph Fields. (The organization manages rights to the team's
songs and shows, both those they wrote together and their many works with other
collaborators.)
"No one was doing the show," Hwang says. "So you had these songs on the shelf
gathering dust. You could always go back and do the original version, but it
would feel like a period piece, charming but very much of its time, and would
lack emotional impact. I wanted to write my own."
Hwang credits the close collaboration of Robert Longbottom and David Chase, the
revival's director and musical director: "They gave me a two-year crash course
in musical theater."
Hwang found the R&H staff "incredibly supportive. They never said, `Don't
change this.' They sometimes said, `This joke doesn't work.'
"I wanted to stay true to what was important: portraying Asian-Americans as a
vital part of this country's great social experiment."
Hwang retained the setting, San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1950s, as well as
the main characters and plotlines. Newly arrived immigrant Mei Li is the
protagonist and falls in love with Ta, whose modern ways clash with the stern
traditionalism of his father, the patriarch Wang.
"The spine of the story is still someone discovering America," Hwang says. "Mei
Li is the best center for that story of the immigrant's journey."
Yet even that element is altered. In Hwang's version, Mei Li does not come to
America as a "picture bride" for an arranged marriage but as a refugee from
Communist China -- and not accompanied by her father, for he has died as a
political prisoner. The father-son conflict of Wang and Ta is given greater
emphasis, while the Americanized showgirl Linda Low becomes somewhat less
prominent, no longer Mei Li's serious romantic rival for Ta.
In this version, Wang operates a failing theater that presents traditional
Chinese opera to dwindling audiences. Ta revitalizes the operation by
instigating "nightclub night" to lure younger customers. When Ta's idea catches
on and takes over the venue's entire schedule, the initially resistant Wang
gets the showbiz bug and transforms himself into slang-slinging emcee Sammy
Fong (who in the original was a separate character and Linda's love interest).
"I wanted to find a metaphor for cultural reconciliation," Hwang says. "Once I
hit on the idea of the clash between the father's traditional Chinese operas
and the son's nightclub programs, the new version fell into place."
That format also allowed Hwang to reframe the original show's intentionally
kitschy nightclub numbers. They no longer seem just a convenient way to bring
on the showgirls but a comment on what Hwang calls the "chop suey circuit" --
nightclubs in major cities during the 1940s and '50s that capitalized on
exaggerated Asian "exotica."
It also lets Hwang turn other numbers, such as Chop Suey, into spoofy nightclub
routines.
Among characters Hwang adds is Chao, the put-upon factory worker Mei Li turns
to when her relationship with Ta runs aground. The name is a nod to Helen Chao,
the lovelorn seamstress of the original, who has been dropped.
"As this version developed," Hwang says, "we made Chao a serious alternative
for Mei Li. We wanted to show someone for whom things are not working out,
who's not having much luck finding the American Dream."
The show manages to keep all but one of the original songs and restores My Best
Love, which had been cut in the Boston tryout. Yet virtually all are presented
in new contexts, and some are sung by different characters. Oddly enough, most
are heard to better dramatic effect than in the original.
A Hundred Million Miracles, the show's haunting signature, is no longer just a
traditional song Mei Li entertains with; it opens and closes the show, becoming
an anthem of hope that sustains her on the voyage to America.
Love Look Away, the show's most moving ballad -- covered by Tony Bennett and
Rosemary Clooney at the time of the original Broadway run -- gains importance
by being reassigned from the supporting character of Helen to Mei Li, as the
climax of the second act.
The changes bring the overall show to the level of the original's best moments.
After viewing the revival on Broadway, actress Pat Suzuki, the original Linda
Low, commented that the new version "has more dignity."
The reworked Flower Drum Song premiered to critical acclaim in 2001 at Los
Angeles' Mark Taper Forum. Arriving on Broadway in fall 2002, it met a mixed
reception but found outspoken champions.
"A work of bravery and intelligence and real faith in the possibilities of
musical theater," wrote Time Magazine's Richard Zoglin. "Hwang has made the
show a richer, more nuanced exploration of the immigrant experience. ... Always
entertaining and frequently affecting."
The rebirth of Flower Drum Song has been of particular interest to C.Y. Lee,
the Chinese-born, Yale-educated author whose 1957 novel inspired the musical.
It was the first of his 11 novels and the first Chinese-American novel to
become a best seller.
"I was seeing stories in papers about Chinese immigration and the gap between
younger and older generations of Chinese-Americans," Lee recalls. "I thought
that would be a good starting point."
Playwright Fields recommended Lee's novel to Hammerstein, who deemed it a "sort
of Chinese Life With Father" and convinced Rodgers it should be the team's next
show, with Fields co-writing the musical's book.
Lee was pleasantly surprised when told by his agent that Rodgers and
Hammerstein wanted to musicalize his first novel.
"They were the biggest names in Broadway theater," Lee says.
The musical shifted the story's focus from the father-son conflict to the son's
involvement with Mei Li and Linda. Lee understood that choice: "I realized they
had to make it something amusing and romantic."
Almost 40 years later, Lee was intrigued to learn of leading Asian-American
playwright Hwang's plan to refresh the musical.
"I saw the new version on Broadway and enjoyed it very much," Lee says. "He
(Hwang) clarified the conflict of the father and son. I think it is more
authentic."
Associated Press
C.Y. Lee wrote the 1957 novel that inspired the 1958 Broadway hit.
Yet the old and new shows use only part of his novel, Lee says.
"I have enough unused material to write a screenplay," he says of his next
project. He'll call it Grant Avenue, after the main thoroughfare of San
Francisco's Chinatown, celebrated in one of the musical's songs.
Broadway's still-struggling post-9/11 climate and a spring musicians strike
made the revival's Broadway run shorter than expected, especially given the
enthusiastic reception in Los Angeles. But TUTS chief Frank Young and his
colleagues at the three co-producing theaters felt their audiences should see
the "new" Rodgers and Hammerstein musical -- and, to their credit, went the
extra mile to make this regional mounting happen.
At the very least, the new Flower Drum Song has taken a neglected work by
Broadway's greatest writing team and restored it to the active repertoire.
"Both the original and my version are available now," Hwang says. "Whether
either will be revived years from now, time will tell. But certainly, what
we've done has given the show a greater life."
Steve Newport
London. This version was a huge bomb. They *need* pc to spin it.
Gary Nichols
in LA. It played to a packed theatre every performance and the run
was extended. And I still love(more) the original Broadway version and
the movie. I ignore PC reviewers and, unfortunately, Hwang who IS
constantly 'beating on' the original FDS. But I think that the 'Miss
Saigon' chip on his shoulder weighs him down.
Didn't Hwangs LA version just transfer to Broadway and open?
Weren't his rewrites done after it opened? What happened?
Gary Nichols
Steve Newport
former_c...@access4less.net (Gary Nichols) I still love (more)
the original Broadway version and the movie. I ignore PC reviewers and,
unfortunately, Hwang who IS constantly 'beating on' the original FDS.
his rewrites done after it opened? ------------------------------------
No, I think the rewites were done before the Broadway opening. As I
recall the interpolated "The Next Time It Happens" was dropped (a tiny
bit remains in the intro to "Love Look Away") and "Sunday" was put back
in.
-------------------------------------
Previously: I wonder if this Everett Evans (and how many other writers
of similar articles in the past three years) ever *saw* the original
version of FLOWER DRUM SONG. I also wonder how many people have been
automatically soured on it; who would now avoid a production (or
watching the movie) of the Hammerstein/Fields version like the plague,
because they have been brainwashed by all the negative remarks of Hwang