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"I tried to write the book that Oscar Hammerstein would have written if he were Asian-American." -David Henry Hwang

create my own story about the joys and the costs of assimilation," says Hwang. "But I wanted to do it in 'collaboration,' so to speak, with these two great giants from the past, and also return more to the spirit of the original C.Y. Lee novel, which is more bittersweet than the Hammerstein-Fields book, which is mostly pretty sweet.
"The themes in this production are the same as in the original," Hwang continues, "but I don't think there's a line left from the original book. Most of the characters have the same names, and the character relationships are similar. I was trying to think of ways to represent the clash of cultures onstage, and the idea came to me to create a theatrical metaphor so that we could look at opposing forms of theater as representation of the cultural and generational class. The show is now set in a traditional Chinese theater in San Francisco's Chinatown in the late fifties, where a patriarch is still doing Chinese opera for almost no audience. His son wants to turn the place into a Western-style nightclub. This allows us to juxtapose theatrical styles of the Old World and the New World. So the new story is about how a traditional theater becomes a Western-style nightclub. It's a metaphor for assimilation and change, and the joys and challenges of that."
"My Best Love," a song that was cut out of town in 1958, has been added to the score, and "The Other Generation" has been dropped. "I Enjoy Being a Girl" and "Chop Suey," songs that today would likely be classified politically incorrect, have been carefully retained. "Those are the two songs that are generally considered problematic, if you look at it from a 'P.C.' standpoint," says Hwang. "I think that by setting the show in a nightclub in that period, what we're able to do is re-create the spirit of numbers that would have been done on the Chop Suey circuit in the fifties. We should be grown up enough to recognize that there are certain things that perhaps reflect a sensibility different from our sensibility today, but that may have been important and even progressive within the context of their time."
With the passage of time, Hwang has again found of Flower Drum Song. "My main feeling about the show at this point is that Rodgers and Hammerstein sincerely tried to do something quite revolutionary," he says. "Flower Drum Song was in some ways very daring for its time, particularly in the casting of mostly asian actors. But the original musical feels a little bit like a tourist's-eye view of Chinatown, as opposed to something viewed from the inside looking out. I tried to write the book that Oscar Hammerstein would have written if he were Asian-American. I didn't approcach this thinking I need to fix Flower Drum Song. That would be patronizing or arrogant. It's more a question of trying to create something new, but which hopefully respects the spirit and the intentions of the original."

Below: Jose Llana as Wang Ta and Lea Salonga as Mei Li star in Flower Drum Song. 

Joan Marcus

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