• Flower Drum Song, 1/20/23 (Fri)

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s mini-hit musical must have seemed old-fashioned even in its day (1958) given the quality of shows playing elsewhere on Broadway at that time, which included My Fair Lady, West Side Story and Gypsy. It pursues the well-trod theme of a generation clash between immigrants and their native children, i.e., tradition vs. assimilation, but this time in a Chinese-American context. The characters could easily be Italian, Jewish or Irish, but the Asian theme provides new visual and musical possibilities that must have attracted the creators, who already had two huge Asia-related hits under their belt.

In the film version three years later, Mei Li, a picture bride from China, has managed to sneak herself and her father into the US, but nightclub owner Sammy Fong, the man who has signed a contract with her, has since decided he prefers his club’s firebrand singer Linda Low. He offers to transfer the contract to Master Wang, a first-generation immigrant tied to the old ways, as a marriage candidate for Wang’s son Ta. Wang is delighted to have a traditional Chinese woman and agrees to take over the contract. However, Ta tells his father that kids in America choose their own bride, without mentioning that he’s already seeing an aggressive sexpot (no actual sex, don’t worry) that the family will never approve of. That naturally becomes a family crisis. Meanwhile, Linda is frustrated as, shades of Nathan and Adelaide, her five-year relationship with Sammy has yet to generate an actual wedding. After the usual complications, Sammy is being forced to honor his contract and marry Mei Li, while the miserable Ta and irritated Linda look helplessly on. Naturally everything works out as Mei Li comes up with an ingenious last-minute solution.

The film is of its era for sure but highly entertaining. The book can be creaky: many jokes revolve around the use of hip language by the kids that the parents don’t understand (e.g., she’s a real tomato, dig it), which is cloying and dates the show badly; it shows the wisdom of West Side Story, whose film version was released the same year, in inventing its own “hip” language that never existed and thus never ages. R&H use their age-old device of two pairs of lovers, one serious and one comic, in what feels like a fixed pattern. Some bits are iffy; it’s never quite clear, for instance, why Fong agreed to marry a mail order bride if he was already dating someone for so long, unless we assume the contract was reached five years earlier. But it’s never a good idea to go too deeply into the facts in shows like this, which resemble the light entertainment popular before the musical revolution that R&H themselves initiated. The main characters are all Chinese variants of instantly recognizable types but well integrated into the story. The only real problem is the character of Helen Chao, a “third wheel” whose side-story of unrequited love for the son is underdeveloped. She ends as little more than a sketch.

The film is nicely opened up and avoids feeling stage-bound. Hammerstein had died by the time the movie was made, and Rodgers reportedly did not take much interest in this compared to past cases. Perhaps for this reason, the songs are drastically reordered from the stage show and the story significantly rewritten, though that in itself is not rare for film adaptations – see, for instance, R&H’s next show The Sound of Music. This film has been compared unfavorably with the stage version, which is hard to judge since that’s virtually never performed these days in its original form – something Encores! urgently needs to address, especially while some of the original cast members are still around. Charges that the film is overblown are fair enough, but no complaints about the individual numbers themselves. Some gripe that the show should have made more of the theme of illegal immigrants rather than the comic treatment given here, but that would be putting a lot of weight on a pretty slender frame, as the horrific 2002 revisal proved pretty decisively. The immigration status of the picture bride is in fact a key plot point at the end, but it is not otherwise dwelt upon. Thank goodness. I enjoyed seeing Chinese-Americans interact in their daily lives without the politics, albeit discounted for the exaggerations common to this genre. I wish there were more shows like this.

Rodgers has written evocative melodies for the native Chinese characters suggestive of a Far Eastern sound (“A Hundred Million Miracles”, “I Am Going to Like It Here”), similar to his vaguely Thai-sounding numbers for The King and I, and Hammerstein has complimented them with imaginative lyrics. The ones for the Chinese-Americans aren’t always to that level, starting with “Chop Suey”, but the general level of the score is high by anybody else’s standard but R&H’s own.

Accusations of racism or ethnic insensitivity are just dumb. As noted, stereotypes here aren’t any worse than those accorded to Jewish or Italian or (place ethnicity here) characters over the years, and the picture bride was part of the original book by Chinese-American author C.Y. Lee. (The concept of a picture bride also figured prominently in the contemporaneous The Most Happy Fella, which dealt with an Italian immigrant and was also set around San Francisco.) I’ve even read complaints about the line, “All white people look the same”, something I’ve heard on multiple occasions in Japan (usually in jest – I think).

What’s really grating is criticism of using Japanese or ethnic Japanese performers like Miyoshi Umeki, James Shigeta and Reiko Sato in Chinese/Chinese-American roles. It’s like saying that English productions of Moliere should use only French-American actors, or Fiddler only Jewish actors. These are clearly not people who work in theater. (And wait until they discover that Jack Soo’s original name was Goro Suzuki.) While the stage production did feature a small number of non-Asians (it was competing for actors with no fewer than four other Asia-themed Broadway shows that year), the sole non-Asian performer in the film version was the black actress Juanita Hall, who repeated her Broadway role as the mom. (She previously played another Asian in R&H’s massive hit South Pacific, both stage and film.) To be fair, the movie role was supposed to go to the estimable Anna May Wong, but when she died just before filming, I suppose the filmmakers just reached out to someone who they knew could handle the role at short notice. Not a bad choice, as it turns out.

When I did an English-language adaptation of a Japanese show years ago in New York, we used actors of various Asian/Pacific ethnicities – Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian – having discovered that Asian-Americans are by and large heavy on the latter and light on the former in everything other than looks. That is, the Japanese-Americans were generally no more Japanese or knowledgeable about Japanese culture than anyone else in the cast. This musical is sometimes said to be the first major Hollywood film with a virtually all-Asian cast, which is not true (R&H’s The King & I is nearly all Asian), but it does seem to be the first to have an Asian-American story played mainly by Asian-Americans, which should be celebrated. A big step considering that Mickey Rooney was simultaneously playing a grotesque Japanese character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (a favorite film in Japan, by the way).

Dance sequences are handled by no less than Hermes Pan, he of Astaire/Rogers fame. They were filmed in long full uncut segments, a tremendous pleasure compared to the jerky MTV style that dominates these days. “The Other Generation” reminded me of the Astaire films in a bad way when it suddenly introduces two random children just for the dance’s sake with no thought of the story, a throwback to the 1930s. But the dance was good fun, so all is forgiven. The film boasted two trained ballerinas in the cast, Nancy Kwan and Sato, and naturally offered dance spots for them. Kwan gets an amusing interaction with a mirror in “I Enjoy Being a Girl” that fits her character to a tee. (It also seems to have inspired a similar number in Bye Bye Birdie.) Sato’s case is somewhat different. While she’s particularly lovely in her ballet, she’s a minor character who’s only there as a plot point to put an obstacle in the way of the main couple; odd that she gets the show’s most beautiful song, the breathtaking “Love, Look Away” (dubbed by opera star Marilyn Horne), and this wonderful dance before drifting away into virtual nothingness. (Apparently she commits suicide in the book, but fortunately they didn’t go that route here.) The Manila-born actor Patrick Adiarte who played Shigeta’s hip younger brother was a spectacular dancer, and they wisely added parts for him. He’s one of several performers held over from the Broadway cast, including Umeki, Juanita Hall and Soo (promoted to a bigger role).

The rest of the cast was wonderful. The standouts were Umeki in a totally convincing reading of the shy Chinese picture bride, Benson Fong as the ornery traditional Chinese father, and Soo as the nightclub owner and obligatory comic character. James Shigeta also did a fine job as the Americanized son.

The musical may be an old-style family-oriented show and not challenging in the least, but it has memorable characters, plenty of humor, lively production numbers, and a far-above-average score. I’m used to seeing musicals played with all-Asian casts here in Japan, including those like The King and I and Hairspray with a built-in need for diverse ethnicities. But it’s great to see an all Asian-American cast in an all Asian-American musical with this level of talent. I understand they’re making an updated film version and can only hope they steer clear of overwrought themes of racism, immigration and so forth and give us something simply purely joyful like this (my expectations are low; see Spielberg’s West Side Story). What I’d really love to see one day is the original stage version if the PC police would let up. In the meantime, we have this version to cherish. Minor R&H, yes, but major everybody else. Super enjoyable film.