Word: flower
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Wham! Pearl Harbor. Half the world away from Otaru, in a bumpy California crossroads hamlet called Cressy (pop. 400), chunky little Chiyoko Suzuki began her rehearsals for Flower Drum just 28 years ago. Youngest of a fair-sized Japanese-American family (a brother twelve years older, and two sisters, eight and ten years older), "Chiby" (Squirt) Suzuki was a loner from the start-a kid who seemed to figure she was expected to take care of herself. She went to a two-room schoolhouse, rode horses bareback, learned to swim in irrigation canals on her father's 100-acre...
Safety in Numbers. R. & H. did not quite write Flower Drum Song for Pat, but at times it seemed close to becoming her show. As Linda Low-hymning "Grant Avenue, San Francisco" with all the fire-cracking verve of Chinatown itself-Pat worked with so much authority that by the time the show opened in Boston, she was practically in command. Stage mikes had to be turned down to keep her lusty voice somewhere within range of Miyoshi's. "Pat have very very sweet voice when she little girl," says her 66-year-old father, Chiyosaku Suzuki. "I like...
...does Papa Suzuki entirely approve of his daughter's Flower Drum role. He does not like to think Pat has drifted so far from ancestral tradition. Especially he dislikes the striptease with which she stops the show. "I don't like it when she start taking off like this." He tries a tentative little laugh and begins to peel off his coat. "We see show in Boston and makes Mama to sweat. In Boston, more strip and very small pants. I'm little scared as I think accidentally come off her pants." Says Pat reassuringly...
...West Love. In the philosophical concept of Yang and Yin, the two elements grow and shrink each at the other's expense, but never wholly obliterate each ather, so that the end result is a kind of universal harmony. This is more or less what happens backstage at Flower Drum Song, according to testimony not only from pressagents-those untrustworthy upbeat philosophers-but according to anybody else connected with the show. And practically everybody gives the credit to the Oriental qualities of patience and politeness. Says Production Supervisor Jerry Whyte, a tough veteran of R. & H. shows since Oklahoma...
...East-West love feast that surrounds Flower Drum Song is no accident, for Rodgers and Hammerstein themselves have reached an almost Oriental serenity in an otherwise hectic and often squalid business. As much as any of their Chinese characters, R. & H. have family feeling. Since they have a permanent production outfit (unlike most other theater men, who fold up after each show), they have given employment to generations of performers. Example: one of Flower Drum's brightest young dancers, Patrick Adiarte, 15, started at eight as one of the younger children in The King and I, kept on playing...