Word: mei
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...mainland-based chairman of the Society for Promoting Taiwanese Business in Shanghai, Chang Fu-mei seldom goes home to his native island. But since returning to Taipei from Shanghai on April 30, he's had more than enough time to reacquaint himself with the inside of his house. Chang's quick trip, necessary mainly to sign a business contract, ran smack into Taiwan's mandatory 10-day quarantine for Taiwanese travelers returning from places hit by SARS. Chang has been forced to count the flowers on his wallpaper while he serves his sentence. "All I can do at home...
...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...
...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...
Director Robert Longbottom (Side Show) skillfully adds Asian seasoning to a gourmet spread of Broadway showmanship. In the opening scenes, Mei-Li's escape from China is pantomimed simply, with the help of bamboo poles manipulated by actors. In the big production number Chop Suey, the chorus girls are dressed as Chinese-takeout boxes. Even that delightfully retro standard I Enjoy Being a Girl, which starts in Linda's dressing room and ends as a number at the club, comes roaring back as if it were brand...
...Xiao Mei Zi, a forceful preschooler on Zhima Jie, China WHAT Encouraging girl power and self-esteem MIGHT SAY I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want...