Not Just Chop Suey

By Richard Zoglin Friday, Oct. 25, 2002
    • The farmer and the cowman are dancing together again in a Broadway revival of Oklahoma! The King and I and Carousel have each got a fresh coat of paint in recent years. Even that postwar war-horse South Pacific is on a national tour and was revived a short time ago in London. But Flower Drum Song has long been the one Rodgers and Hammerstein hit that no one wants to revive, tucked away in the drawer where dated ethnic stereotypes are sent.

    Playwright David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) was one of many Asian Americans with mixed feelings about the 1958 show's cliched and old-fashioned portrayal of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. But he's the one who decided to do something about it. Working with seasoned Broadway pros and watched over by the guardians of the Rodgers and Hammerstein canon, he totally rewrote the musical's book. Characters were changed, songs were rearranged (one, The Other Generation, was dropped), and more historical context was added. "It was an opportunity," says Hwang, "to do my own story about Chinese immigration and Americanization as seen through the eyes of Asians, but to do it in collaboration with the two greatest musical artists of the 20th century."


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    To which a theatergoer can only respond with a nervous gulp. The good news is that despite the show's occasional pretensions (and a gauntlet of critics suddenly quite protective of a musical they never much liked in the first place), Hwang has succeeded. Flower Drum Song has been rescued from the dustbin of theater history and made relevant again without getting weighed down by political correctness. This new Broadway revival is a work of bravery and intelligence and real faith in the possibilities of musical theater.

    The show starts from the original point of departure — a Chinese girl, Mei-Li (Lea Salonga, who starred in Miss Saigon), gets off the boat and arrives in San Francisco's Chinatown — but Hwang has taken all the pieces apart and put them back together in a new configuration. The tradition-bound patriarch (Randall Duk Kim) is now the owner of a Chinatown theater, where he stages Chinese opera to sparse crowds, while his son (Jose Llana) tries to modernize the place with glitzy American-style shows. Some of Hwang's rewrite is too clever by half: midway through the evening the old man gets the show-biz bug and changes his name to Sammy Fong (a separate character in the original), while his son does a backflip and becomes the defender of tradition. Screw heads back on here.

    But Hwang has made the show a richer, more nuanced exploration of the immigrant experience. One new character, a laborer who wants to take Mei-Li back to Hong Kong ("They try so hard to fit in," he says of his assimilation-minded countrymen, "they don't even know who they are"), reminds us that there were many left out of the American Dream. Hwang is more respectful of the old characters too: the sexy nightclub singer Linda Low (Sandra Allen) was a conniving man eater in the old show; now she's a warm, sisterly and surprisingly full-blooded character. And if Salonga's stolidity as Mei-Li gets to be a little monotonous, she's the calm center of a show that is always entertaining and frequently affecting.

    Director Robert Longbottom (Side Show) skillfully adds Asian seasoning to a gourmet spread of Broadway showmanship. In the opening scenes, Mei-Li's escape from China is pantomimed simply, with the help of bamboo poles manipulated by actors. In the big production number Chop Suey, the chorus girls are dressed as Chinese-takeout boxes. Even that delightfully retro standard I Enjoy Being a Girl, which starts in Linda's dressing room and ends as a number at the club, comes roaring back as if it were brand new.

    Finally, the show works because it doesn't condescend. Hwang confesses that Flower Drum Song was always a guilty pleasure: for all its stereotypes, it portrayed the Asian experience as no show had before and few have since. "Many things about it remain revolutionary today," says Hwang. "You don't see on TV or movie screens in American pop culture a romance between an Asian man and an Asian woman. I'm still amazed by the fact that there was a Flower Drum Song." And we should be amazed that this Song is back in tune.