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CULTURE CLASH
by Sheryl Flatow

The new Broadway production of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song, opening this month at the Virginia Theatre and starring Lea Salonga, is not so much a revival as a revisal of the 1958 musical. The score, which includes such songs as "You are Beautiful," "A Hundred Million Miracles," "I Enjoy Being a Girl," and the haunting underappreciated "Love, Look Away," remains virtually intact. But the book by Hammerstein and Joseph Fields has been rewritten by David Henry Hwang (M. Butterly), whose childhood affection for and subsequent disenchantment with the 1961 movie ultimately propelled him to reexamine the piece.

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David Henry Hwang
David Henry Hwang's new book for Rodgers & Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song retains the joy of the original while introducing a more complex view of cultural assimilation and generational struggles

"My relationship to the original show is ambivalent and maybe a little complicated," says Hwang. "It is a musical that I grew up loving as a kid. As a child I wouldn't watch anything in film or on television that had Asian characters, and I couldn't articulate to myself at the time why they made me feel bad. But Flower Drum Song was the singular exception, because it had Asian characters-at least the younger generation-who were clearly American. It had a love story between an Asian man an an Asian woman, which you still don't much see today. And they were singing and dancing. But by the time I got to college in the seventies, we started to emphasize and discover the ways the work felt sometimes patronizing and sometimes stereotypical." 
Set in San Francisco's Chinatown and based on a novel by C.Y. Lee, Flower Drum Song was the third Rodgers and Hammerstein show with an "East-meets-West" theme. But unlike South Pacific and The King and I, the clash of cultures-Chinese traditional vs. American contemporary-was handled as a musical comedy. In the original production, a mail-order bride named Mei Li is promised in marriage to Sammy Fong, a nightclub owner (who was played by the decidedly non-Asian Larry Blyden). But Mei Li is in love with Wang Ta, who is in love with nightclub singer Linda Low, who is in love with Sammy, who loves her in return. Wang Ta comes to realize he really loves Mei Li, and in the end everyone ends up with the person he or she desires.
Hwang began to consider the idea of taking a new approach to Flower Drum Song after seeing the acclaimed 1996 production of The King and I, in which Eastern culture was given as much weight as Western culture. "I started to wonder whether it would be possible to take this great score and try to

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