![]() This love triangle takes center stage for much of the evening, with Mei-Li and Ta performing some songs formerly given to characters now absent from the show. She is encouraged in this pursuit by Linda Low (Sandra Allen), the ambitious, thoroughly Americanized star of the nightclub’s floor show, on whom Ta has an unrequited crush. Mei-Li is recruited to join the opera ensemble, and is soon secretly swooning for Ta. The original’s demure mail-order bride Mei-Li (Lea Salonga) is now a demure refugee from the Communists who killed her father, a history skillfully staged in the opening number, “A Hundred Million Miracles.” She arrives in San Francisco and seeks out her father’s best friend Wang (Randall Duk Kim), a specialist in traditional Chinese opera who is proudly still plying his trade to the Exit signs, much to the chagrin of his son Ta (Jose Llana), who runs a popular nightclub in the opera house one night a week. (Only late in the second act are there hints of the darker mood Hwang may have at one point experimented with perhaps he was ultimately unable to reconcile these impulses with the brassy pleasures of the score.) ![]() But structural ingenuity can’t make up for bland characterization and an endless barrage of wisecracks that belies Hwang’s stated desire to bring more depth and emotional integrity to the musical. In collaboration with director-choreographer Robert Longbottom, Hwang has done a fine job of creating a more clarified storyline, and they’ve smoothly integrated all but one of the original songs into a plot that now only tangentially resembles the original. Perhaps that affection is the problem, for the most odd and lamentable aspect of Broadway’s new “Flower Drum Song” is the fustiness of Hwang’s book, a compendium of cardboard characters and corny jokes that can only be identified as a new product from its frequent anachronisms (definitely not said in 1960: “Foot binding - what was that all about?”). ![]() He has also admitted to an affection for the movie version of the musical, which he describes as “a guilty pleasure” for Asian-Americans of his generation. Lee): the conflicts between first-generation immigrants and their descendants, the internal battles Asian-Americans wage between a desire to assimilate into a new culture and a reverence for traditions inherited from the old. Hwang, the country’s foremost Asian-American playwright, has written extensively on themes that were integral to the original (itself based on a novel by C.Y. A cluttered book, a stereotypical approach to its Asian-American characters and a score that doesn’t match the best of R&H are the very defensible reasons for the show’s absence from major stages over the past four decades.īut even this second-rank Rodgers & Hammerstein score contains a lot of first-rate music, and in the interest of giving it a new lease on life, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization granted David Henry Hwang permission to concoct an entirely new book. “Flower Drum Song” is the only one of the major R&H shows that hasn’t previously been given a first-class revival. The last item on the menu in Broadway’s yearlong celebration of the 100th birthday of Rodgers (Broadway has already hosted revivals of “Oklahoma!” and “The Boys From Syracuse”), this is also the most historically significant.
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