Гүлдер әні: Роджерс пен Хаммерштейн мюзиклінің тарихы

Musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein premiered in 1958
the musical

Flower Drum Song was the eighth musical by the team of Rodgers and Hammerstein. It is based on the 1957 novel, The Flower Drum Song, by Chinese American author C. Y. Lee. It premiered on Broadway in 1958 and was then performed in the West End and on tour. It was adapted for a 1961 musical film. After their extraordinary early successes, beginning with Oklahoma! in 1943, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II had written two musicals in the 1950s that did not do well and sought a new hit to revive their fortunes. Lee's novel focuses on a father, Wang Chi yang, a wealthy refugee from China, who clings to traditional values in San Francisco's Chinatown. Rodgers and Hammerstein shifted the focus of the musical to his son, Wang Ta, who is torn between his Chinese roots and assimilation into American culture. The team hired Gene Kelly to make his debut as a stage director with the musical and scoured the country for a suitable Asian – or at least, plausibly Asian looking – cast. The musical, more light hearted than Lee's novel, was profitable on Broadway and was followed by a national tour. After the release of the 1961 film version, the musical was rarely produced, as it presented casting issues and fears that Asian Americans would take offense at how they are portrayed. When it was put on the stage, lines and songs that might be offensive were often cut. The piece did not return to Broadway until 2002, when a version with a plot by playwright David Henry Hwang (but retaining most of the original songs) was presented after a successful Los Angeles run. Hwang's story retains the Chinatown setting and the inter generational and immigrant themes, and emphasizes the romantic relationships. It received mostly poor reviews in New York and closed after six months but had a short tour and has since been produced regionally.

C. Y. Lee fled war torn China in the 1940s and came to the United States, where he attended Yale University's playwriting program, graduating in 1947 with an M. F. A. degree. By the 1950s, he was barely making a living writing short stories and working as a Chinese teacher, translator and journalist for San Francisco Chinatown newspapers. He had hoped to break into playwriting, but instead wrote a novel about Chinatown, The Flower Drum Song (originally titled Grant Avenue). Lee initially had no success selling his novel, but his agent submitted it to the publishing house of Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. The firm sent the manuscript to an elderly reader for evaluation. The reader was found dead in bed, the manuscript beside him with the words "Read this" scrawled on it. The publishing house did, and bought Lee's novel, which became a bestseller in 1957. Lee's novel centers on Wang Chi yang, a 63 year old man who fled China to avoid the communists. The wealthy refugee lives in a house in Chinatown with his two sons. His sister in law, Madam Tang, who takes citizenship classes, is a regular visitor and urges Wang to adopt Western ways. While his sons and sister in law are integrating into American culture, Wang stubbornly resists assimilation and speaks only two words of English, "Yes" and "No". Wang also has a severe cough, which he does not wish to have cured, feeling that it gives him authority in his household. Wang's elder son, Wang Ta, woos Linda Tung, but on learning that she has many men in her life, drops her; he later learns she is a nightclub dancer. Linda's friend, seamstress Helen Chao, who has been unable to find a man despite the shortage of eligible women in Chinatown, gets Ta drunk and seduces him. On awakening in her bed, he agrees to an affair, but eventually abandons her, and she commits suicide. Impatient at Ta's inability to find a wife, Wang arranges for a picture bride for his son. However, before the picture bride arrives, Ta meets a young woman, May Li, who with her father has recently come to San Francisco. The two support themselves by singing depressing flower drum songs on the street. Ta invites the two into the Wang household, with his father's approval, and he and May Li fall in love. He vows to marry her after she is falsely accused by the household servants of stealing a clock, though his father forbids it. Wang struggles to understand the conflicts that have torn his household apart; his hostility toward assimilation is isolating him from his family. In the end, taking his son's advice, Wang decides not to go to the herbalist to seek a remedy for his cough, but walks to a Chinese run Western clinic, symbolizing that he is beginning to accept American culture.

Rodgers and Hammerstein, despite extraordinary successes earlier in their partnership, such as Oklahoma!, Carousel and South Pacific, had suffered back to back Broadway relative failures in the mid 1950s with Me and Juliet and Pipe Dream. While Oklahoma! had broken new ground in 1943, any new project in the late 1950s would have to compete with modern musicals and techniques, like the brutal realism in West Side Story, and with other Broadway musical hits such as The Music Man, My Fair Lady and The Pajama Game. Rodgers and Hammerstein had made it their rule to begin work on their next musical as soon as the last opened on Broadway, but by the start of 1957, six months after Pipe Dream closed, the pair had no new stage musical in prospect. They had, however, been working since 1956 on the popular television version of Cinderella, which was broadcast on CBS on March 31, 1957. Rodgers was still recovering from an operation for cancer in a tooth socket, and he was drinking heavily and suffering from depression. In June 1957, Rodgers checked himself into Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, and he remained there for twelve weeks. According to his daughters, Mary and Linda, this did not put a stop to his drinking. Hammerstein, meanwhile, was in Los Angeles at the filming of South Pacific. While at the commissary, he met longtime friend, Joe Fields, who mentioned that he was negotiating for the rights to The Flower Drum Song. Intrigued by the title, Hammerstein asked for a copy of the novel, and decided that it had potential as a musical – the lyricist described it as "sort of a Chinese Life with Father". Hammerstein consulted with Rodgers, and they agreed to make it their next work, to be written and produced in association with Fields. Hammerstein began work in mid 1958. In July, however, he fell ill and was hospitalized for a month. This forced him to hurry his writing, as the production team had hoped to have the show in rehearsal by the start of September; this was postponed by two weeks. In interviews, however, Hammerstein pointed out that he had, when necessary, written songs for previous shows while in rehearsals for them. The musical retained Lee's "central theme – a theme coursing through much 20th century American literature: the conflict between Old World immigrants and their New World offspring". This made the musical more lighthearted and comedic than the novel. According to David Lewis in his book about the musical, "Mr. Hammerstein and his colleagues were evidently in no mood to write a musical drama or even to invest their comedic approach with dramatic counterpoint of the sort that Jud Fry had given Oklahoma! [They] took the safest commercial route by following the eldest son's search for love – the most popular theme at the time with Broadway audiences." Though the new story was less artistically adventurous than the earlier Rodgers and Hammerstein hits, it was innovative, even daring in its treatment of Asian Americans, "an ethnic group that had long been harshly caricatured and marginalized in our mainstream pop culture." to announce Linda as his bride, he finds Mei Li and her father there, and the elders insist that he honor his betrothal to the immigrant girl. Ta brings Mei Li a wedding gift of a pair of his mother's earrings that she wore on her wedding day and tries unsuccessfully to hide the fact that he is now deeply in love with her. The wedding procession moves down San Francisco's Grant Avenue with the bride, heavily veiled, carried on a sedan chair ("Wedding Parade"). Sammy drinks from the traditional wedding goblet, then offers the goblet to his new bride. Unveiled, Mei Li confesses to Sammy's mother that she cannot marry Sammy as she is an illegal alien – a tactic she learned by watching American television. The contract is void, and that gives both Sammy and Ta the opportunity to marry their true loves, Linda and Mei Li.

According to Rodgers biographer Meryle Secrest, Rodgers, Hammerstein and Fields had hoped to engage Yul Brynner as director. Brynner, who had gained fame in the team's 1951 hit, The King and I, was an accomplished director. However, he was busy starring in The Sound and the Fury, and they could not negotiate his release from Twentieth Century Fox. Instead, they hired actor and dancer Gene Kelly, who had never directed on stage before. Kelly felt that the work would not be one of Rodgers and Hammerstein's best, but "as long as I crammed the show brim full of every joke and gimmick in the book, I could get it to work". The three producers sought Chinese, or at least Asian, actors to fill the cast, an idea that was, at the time, considered "very risky". Critics note, in any case, that Asian Americans "had found few opportunities in mainstream theatre." They cast Keye Luke, well known as Charlie Chan's Number One Son, as Master Wang. Rodgers and Hammerstein considered young talent from The King and I who might fit the parts, and came up with teenager Patrick Adiarte, a Filipino American who had played several of the young princes as he grew up, before finishing as the crown prince, Chulalongkorn. A talented dancer, he was cast as Wang San, Ta's thoroughly Americanized younger brother. Pat Suzuki, a Japanese American who had been interned during World War II, was a recent arrival in New York who had made strong positive impressions for her singing on such television programs as The Tonight Show (with Jack Paar) and The Ed Sullivan Show. She became the first Linda Low, as Ta's nightclub love interest was renamed. The team found it difficult to fill the remaining places in the company with Asian performers, especially in the chorus. Four other shows with Asian themes had opened or were in rehearsal in New York, and the demand for the few Asian actors was strong. Kelly and the show's choreographer, Carol Haney, journeyed to cities across the country to seek out talent. Agents were sent to other cities; in Honolulu, they found nightclub singer and native Hawaiian Ed Kenney, who would originate Wang Ta. Meanwhile, in New York, the three producers were visiting dance schools. An advertisement in New York Chinatown newspapers received one response. No formal audition was held in San Francisco's Chinatown, and the only find was Forbidden City nightclub comedian Goro "Jack" Suzuki (who soon changed his name to Jack Soo), who was cast as Frankie Wing, comedian at Sammy Fong's Celestial Bar. The role of Fong proved difficult to cast. Initially, it was given to Larry Storch, a nightclub comic, but during the Boston tryouts, it was given to another Caucasian, Larry Blyden, The role of Madam Liang, Master Wang's sister in law, fell to Juanita Hall, a light skinned African American who had played a Tonkinese (Vietnamese) woman, Bloody Mary, in South Pacific. Another African American performer, Diahann Carroll, was considered for the cast but not hired. Rodgers later wrote, "what was important was that the actors gave the illusion of being Chinese. This demonstrates one of the most wonderful things about theatre audiences. People want to believe what they see on a stage, and they will gladly go along with whatever is done to achieve the desired effect. Ask them to accept Ezio Pinza as a Frenchman [in South Pacific], Yul Brynner as Siamese and they are prepared to meet you nine tenths of the way even before the curtain goes up." A number of changes were made to the songs. "My Best Love", a song for Master Wang, was at first thought better suited to his sister in law, but when Juanita Hall could not make it work, the song was cut entirely. Rodgers and Hammerstein transformed a song entitled "She Is Beautiful" into "You Are Beautiful". The team decided to include a song for Sammy Fong to explain to Mei Li that they should not wed. In the span of a few hours, they wrote the lyrics and music to "Don't Marry Me". Shortly after the Boston opening, Fields suffered a heart attack, and, after his release from the hospital, he had to return to New York to recuperate. Author C. Y. Lee, who had quietly watched the rehearsals, recalled that, at the Boston performances, Hammerstein would have a secretary mark on the script any sound of the chairs squeaking, as indicating that the audience was restless. Hammerstein rewrote some of the book to expand the focus from Ta himself to the romantic relationships of the two couples.

The show opened in London's Palace Theatre on March 24, 1960, and ran for 464 performances. Fewer Asian performers were used in London; the West End production starred Yau Shan Tung as Mei Li, Kevin Scott as Ta, George Minami as Wang, Harriet Yamasaki ("Yama Saki") as Linda Low, Tim Herbert as Sammy Fong and Ida Shepley as Madam Liang. The production used Haney's choreography, Bennett's orchestrations and the Broadway set and costume designs, but was directed and supervised by Jerome Whyte. Both the production and the London cast album were well received. Following the closure of the Broadway production, a U. S. national tour began on May 10, 1960, in Detroit. Four of the New York leads, Hall, Soo, Kenney and Luke, joined the tour. By this time, Hammerstein was in his final illness (he died in August 1960), and none of the three producers accompanied the show on the road. After three weeks in Detroit, the show moved to Los Angeles, where the premiere attracted a star studded audience, including three Scandinavian princesses. San Francisco gave the show a rapturous reception when it opened at the Curran Theatre on August 1. Lee and Fields, both present for the local premiere, were given ovations. The tour continued to be successful, spending 21 weeks in Chicago alone. It closed on October 14, 1961, in Cleveland, a month before the film of the musical opened. Lewis calls the 1961 film version of Flower Drum Song, starring Umeki, Soo, Hall and Suzie Wong star Nancy Kwan, "a bizarre pastiche of limping mediocrity". He comments that since the 1958 version of the musical was rarely revived, the film "would in future years come to stand for the stage musical it so crassly misrepresented" and would serve as the version that academics and latter day theatre critics would judge when they analyzed the musical. The film was the only Hollywood adaptation of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical to lose money. Nevertheless, it was nominated for five Academy Awards and featured choreography by Hermes Pan. It was less successfully revived by that company five years later; though it still attracted large crowds, local critics complained that Hammerstein's view of Asians was outdated. Other early productions included successful revivals by the St. Louis Municipal Opera in 1961 and 1965 and revivals in the San Francisco area in 1963 and 1964, both times with Soo as Sammy Fong. The musical proved difficult to produce for amateur and school groups, however, because it requires a cast either Asian or made up as Asian. Even professional companies found it difficult to round up an entire cast of Asian singer dancer actors. By the late 1960s, the musical was rarely staged, The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, which licenses the partnership's works, believes that the work's loss of popularity was due in part to increased racial sensitivity in the U. S. after the civil rights movement. They added a scene in which Mei Li listens apprehensively to a radio broadcast warning about the dangers to the United States caused by Asian immigration. Many lines of dialogue were cut, and producer Fred Van Patten stated that "[w]hat we've done is cut things in the show that Asians said to make white people laugh." The song "Chop Suey" was deleted, as was Master Wang's line that all white men look alike (based on a line in C. Y. Lee's novel, in which Wang states that all foreigners look alike). The author gave a rare public interview to defend his novel and the musical adaptation. The production, which had been scheduled for a three week run, closed early. A well attended production in Oakland in 1993 adhered strictly to the 1958 script, though part of the ballet was cut for lack of rehearsal time; a more heavily censored 1996 production in San Mateo also did well at the box office.