New Book: Flower Drum Songs
Lewis begins the saga with the plight of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II in the mid-to-late '50s, the kings of Broadway musicals who were coming off two successive Broadway failures while also suffering from personal demons. Then Lewis tells us about the world of C.Y. Lee, the Chinese-American writer who put to use his experiences as an immigrant living in San Francisco's Chinatown by creating a well-received novel that was first called Grant Avenue but was eventually retitled The Flower Drum Song.
With a book co-authored by Joseph Fields, a musical version of Lee's novel became the show on which Rodgers and Hammerstein pinned their hopes for another hit. But Lewis notes that, under the influence of Fields, the team chose to focus on the novel's sunny side, ignoring its more dramatic elements. Because R&H were in search of a hit, they took "the safest commercial route," minimizing the father's story and instead focusing on the eldest son's search for love. "Hammerstein," Lewis writes, "chose not to wander too far off the Grant Avenue traveled by entranced tourists."
Casting the original Broadway production presented a challenge, for the dearth of Asian roles available in the late '50s meant that there was not a large pool of Chinese actors from which to choose. As a result, the leads included a Japanese Oscar-winner Miyoshi Umeki, an American-born singer of Japanese descent Pat Suzuki, an African-American Juanita Hall, a Hawaiian Ed Kenney, and, most surprisingly, the Caucasian Larry Storch in the major role of Sammy Fong.
Hired to stage his first Broadway musical was the leading man of Rodgers' Pal Joey, Gene Kelly. Lewis theorizes that Kelly was hired for an affable personality that would "help soften the potential trauma for a cast of neophyte Asians working in a new show headed for the big time." But "the cast quickly sensed an unsure hand," so Fields and James Hammerstein son of Oscar II also became involved in the staging. Although Carol Haney was the show's choreographer, Lewis notes that Kelly staged the charming "Sunday" number.
The show's trump card proved to be its pair of leading ladies, brash belter Suzuki and delicately adorable Umeki. Although reviews in Boston were very encouraging, it was still thought necessary to build up the leading ladies' roles to take further advantage of their talents. Deemed too pretty for her role of the rejected Helen Chao, Arabella Hong had to be deglamorized. Keye Luke's solo song, "My Best Love," was dropped," the duet "Don't Marry Me" was added, and Storch was fired and replaced by another Caucasian, Larry Blyden. Perhaps even more significantly, Lewis reports that laughs were emphasized at the expense of depth, with the show turning "a touching little novel into a lightweight song and dance diversion."
The New York reviews were generally good, although Kenneth Tynan's attack in The New Yorker had its effect. The profitable if unspectacular run stretched to 600 performances, followed by a national tour during which, Lewis implies, the show was improved. Continuing from Broadway were Kenney, Luke, Jack Soo who had replaced Blyden during the Broadway run, and Hall, who became involved in a conflict with other cast members over support of a New York actors' strike.
Having read the first 100 pages, one isn't quite sure just how highly Lewis regards the original Broadway version of Flower Drum Song, as he is quick to point out its shortcomings. But as he moves on to the movie and the Broadway revival, his feelings about the original become clearer. Of the Hollywood version, Lewis writes that it "coarsened the subtler Asian charms of the original." The musical was "inflated into a disjointed panorama of pedestrian fifties cliches," resulting in "a bizarre pastiche of limping mediocrity which would in future years come to stand for the stage musical it so crassly misrepresented." This writer doesn't feel that the film is that bad, and, in fact, treasures it for its preservation of stage performers Umeki, Hall, Soo, and Patrick Adiarte.
Largely because of what he perceives as "a sad residual history of critical disdain based on a celluloid crime," Flower Drum Song's reputation declines with the years. More significantly, it comes to be accused of ethnic insensitivity and of offering stereotypes offensive to Asian Americans. Lewis describes how a 1983 San Francisco revival encounters protests, alters the script to remove supposedly offensive passages, and turns into a disaster. "Once the accusations of political incorrectness had marked it as damaged goods," Lewis writes, "Flower Drum Song nearly faded into the vast wilderness of forgotten musicals deemed too old-hat and out-of-step for revival."
After a rather shaky analysis of the dated quaintness of the R&H canon in general, Lewis arrives at "the most dramatic chapter in the history of New York revivals." Enter David Henry Hwang M. Butterfly, Aida, Tarzan, the world's most famous Chinese American playwright, proposing to write an entirely new book for a property with which he had long had a love-hate relationship.
With a wholly new script by Hwang but with most of the original songs, the new Flower Drum Song has a well-received premiere at L.A.'s Mark Taper Forum. But there are already problems. Lewis says that, as was the case with the original, the revival in rehearsal got lighter. There's the problem of attempting to fit old songs into a new book. And Lewis mentions conflicts between director-choreographer Robert Longbottom and some of the cast members. Half the cast is left in L.A. when the new Flower Drum Song is brought to Broadway.
And here's where Lewis' assessment of the Hwang version becomes blunter. The fact that the show received a mostly negative critical reception in New York can be partly attributed to the fact that "Hwang never called a halt to his incessant tinkerings," with Lewis stating that "the absence of a clear narrative focus can cause a librettist to endlessly rewrite." Lewis quotes cast member Jodi Long, who accurately notes that, "In a sincere effort to deepen the drama of the piece, they sacrificed what I thought was the sweet innocence of the version we did at the Taper."
Lewis accuses Hwang of steadily watering down the journey of central character Wang, and of betraying C.Y. Lee's novel by mostly ignoring it. Hwang "seems to have sacrificed his bite in a schism of structural styles." Lewis goes on to dub the new Flower Drum Song "an exuberantly reconstructed collage of too many disparate parts to take an audience on a satisfying ride to anywhere," maintaining that the show's principal liability was "Hwang's inability to deliver a focused work of force."
Lewis ends his book, which spreads black-and-white photographs throughout the text, with a stinging attack on the advisability of rewriting old musicals and of violating the legacy of masters like Rodgers and Hammerstein. "The strange saga of the Hwang 'revisical' comprises one of the saddest and most troublesome chapters in American musical theatre history," Lewis concludes.
While this writer shares some of the same feelings about the old vs. the new Flower Drum Song, I felt that Lewis' book fails to make a sufficiently strong case for the original, although he recalls it with nostalgic euphoria when he gets to the revision. And there are other problems. Lewis doesn't supply sufficient information about the differences between the three original Broadway, film, Broadway revival scripts, or about how those scripts compare to the original novel. While Lewis offers an entire chapter on the national tour of the original, he ignores the London production, which played a year and was recorded. In fact, he goes as far as to state that when the tour played Canada, it was "the first and only foreign country in which the show would appear."
Lewis is incorrect when he states that director Trevor Nunn "was not interested in altering the text at all" when he staged Oklahoma! There were alterations, particularly in the structure of the lengthy first scene. Lewis suggests that a new version of South Pacific could be next, but it has already happened, in the form of Nunn's revised National Theatre production and the Glenn Close TV film.
Lewis relies heavily on the testimony of a limited number of interviews with members of the Flower Drum Song original and tour, giving several of them undue importance in the history of the show. And there are a number of mistakes: Lewis seems to believe that Jack Cole choreographed The Pajama Game, and refers to "Variety's Christopher Isherwood," "Italian heartthrob Antonio Banderas," and the Flower Drum Song revival's venue as the "Virginia Street Theatre." And numerous names are misspelled, from "Marilyn Horn" to "Vincent Minnelli" and "Ivor Novella."
Still, you'll probably wish to investigate Flower Drum Songs, as it raises questions about the treatment of vintage musicals which have yet to be definitively answered.