Theater: 'Flower Drum Song' / Reworked version of Rodgers and Hammerstein musical blooms at the Ordway out of longtime friendship

By Dominic P. Papatola
dpapatola@pioneerpress.com
Updated: 06/24/2009 11:40:40 AM CDT

If it wasn't for David Henry Hwang, there would be no Theater Mu.

OK, that's an egregious stretch of the truth, but it's also a handy way to link America's preeminent Asian dramatist with Minnesota's foremost Asian-American performance company. The connection was forged long ago and far away ... in the Toronto of 1980, to be precise.

During that Canadian winter, Hwang and fellow musician and fledgling playwright Philip Kan Gotanda were invited by a community organizer and mandolin player named Rick Shiomi to travel north from San Francisco to play their distinctive blend of what Hwang now sardonically describes as "Asian-American protest music." A bond formed between the three men, with Gotanda and Hwang encouraging Shiomi to turn his short story "Yellow Fever" into a play.

Gotanda would go on to write for the stage and screen. Hwang would become a breakout Asian-American playwright who was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Shiomi wrote his play, got bit by the theater bug and wound up moving to Minnesota, where, in 1992, he would found Mu. The circle comes all the way around this weekend, when Shiomi's company opens a production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "Flower Drum Song" with a book completely re-imagined by Hwang.

"I don't think there's a line left in the original book, and if there is, it's completely accidental," joked Hwang. "I kept the names of the characters and the basic situations, but I wanted to get back more into the
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spirit of the novel, which is kind of bittersweet on the subject of Americanization. That's opposed to the Hammerstein book, which is pretty much just sweet."

The original 1958 version was a landmark for New York; the first Broadway musical about Asian-Americans featuring a mostly Asian-American cast. But its progressive-for-its-time libretto fell out of favor as the years went on, and the show was gathering dust in the library of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, with few theaters willing to take the show out of mothballs.

"I had a complicated relationship with the show," Hwang said. "I really enjoyed it as a kid, but then as a young adult, when I got involved in the Asian-American literary movement, it was the kind of thing we were reacting against. The reason that it wasn't being done was either because people think Asian-Americans will find it stereotypical and/or that the mainstream theatrical establishment feels it's too hard to cast, and the book is too creaky."

Hwang approached the Rodgers and Hammerstein estate in the late 1990s, proposing to rework the show. It was an audacious request; the handlers of the RH legacy are known in the business to be scrupulously protective of the creators' work and generally reluctant to let outsiders manipulate it.

"They've certainly earned that reputation," Hwang said, "but they gave me permission to take it and do what I wanted with it. Between the birth of the idea and the time we opened on Broadway (in 2002) they were closely involved, and they gave a lot of notes but they never gave me preservationist notes. They were creative and they were practical."

"Flower Drum Song" didn't exactly blossom on Broadway, playing just 169 performances over five months. Still, Mu's Shiomi said that, when he saw the New York production, "I felt it was really clever and had a lot of ideas about the Asian-American experience expressed from an Asian-American point of view. The story, the character and the perspectives are all really ours."

The musical is only the second of Hwang's works that Mu has staged, the first being the playwright's lesser-known "Sound of a Voice," which Mu produced more than a decade ago. But the local company is making up for lost time with Shiomi's old friend: Next season, Mu will stage Hwang's most recent play — "Yellow Face" at the Guthrie. And the Guthrie Theater will stage its first Hwang play ever next season when it undertakes the playwright's best-known work, "M. Butterfly."

Hwang pronounces himself delighted with the attention being showered upon him in the Twin Cities. "It's kind of the unofficial version of the Guthrie's Kushner Festival," he quipped. "Isn't it?"

Theater critic Dominic P. Papatola can be reached at 651-228-2165.