Word: hwang
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...show starts from the original point of departure--a Chinese girl, Mei-Li (Lea Salonga, who starred in Miss Saigon), gets off the boat and arrives in San Francisco's Chinatown--but Hwang has taken all the pieces apart and put them back together in a new configuration. The tradition-bound patriarch (Randall Duk Kim) is now the owner of a Chinatown theater, where he stages Chinese opera to sparse crowds, while his son (Jose Llana) tries to modernize the place with glitzy American-style shows. Some of Hwang's rewrite is too clever by half: midway through the evening...
Playwright David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) was one of many Asian Americans with mixed feelings about the 1958 show's cliched and old-fashioned portrayal of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. But he's the one who decided to do something about it. Working with seasoned Broadway pros and watched over by the guardians of the Rodgers and Hammerstein canon, he totally rewrote the musical's book. Characters were changed, songs were rearranged (one, The Other Generation, was dropped), and more historical context was added. "It was an opportunity," says Hwang, "to do my own story about Chinese immigration...
...which a theatergoer can only respond with a nervous gulp. The good news is that despite the show's occasional pretensions (and a gauntlet of critics suddenly quite protective of a musical they never much liked in the first place), Hwang has succeeded. Flower Drum Song has been rescued from the dustbin of theater history and made relevant again without getting weighed down by political correctness. This new Broadway revival is a work of bravery and intelligence and real faith in the possibilities of musical theater...
...Hwang has made the show a richer, more nuanced exploration of the immigrant experience. One new character, a laborer who wants to take Mei-Li back to Hong Kong ("They try so hard to fit in," he says of his assimilation-minded countrymen, "they don't even know who they are"), reminds us that there were many left out of the American Dream. Hwang is more respectful of the old characters too: the sexy nightclub singer Linda Low (Sandra Allen) was a conniving man eater in the old show; now she's a warm, sisterly and surprisingly full-blooded character...
...Vanessa G. Henke ’02, Susie Y. Huang ’02, and Rachel E. Ahern ’02; from Winthrop House, Mekhala Krishnamurthy ’02, Narie J. Yoo ’02, John M. Gansner ’02 and Jeremy Chao-Yen Hwang...