Word: songs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...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!: "I dread to think...
...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...
...Wang Chi-yang, Flower Drum Song's venerable elder, likes the feel of money and distrusts outside financial institutions, so do Rodgers and Hammerstein. Where other producers more often than not must hunt down angels, R. & H. have the problem of fighting off outside investors, mostly use their own capital or that of family members and close friends. And they go about their business with Confucian calm; voices are virtually never raised at an R. & H. rehearsal, except in song...
Saving Grace. Their determined serenity is sometimes derided; says Cole Porter: "I could spot Dick's songs anywhere. There is a certain holiness about them." But with serenity goes an unfailing professional competence. In Flower Drum-Song they do not shrink from such corn as a hula-hooping little girl and that ancient scene about the Chinese maiden who does not understand Western kissing; but there is always a saving grace of humor or taste, or at least professionalism. As their own producers, they ruthlessly cut their favorite songs or scenes if they detect that alarming rustle of inattention...