(Blyden replaced another white actor, future F Troop star Larry Storch, in the role of Sammy Fong.) (It was reported that a casting advertisement in a local New York Chinese-language newspaper yielded a solitary response.) As a result, actors of varying backgrounds were cast including Keye Luke, a longtime Hollywood presence of true Chinese heritage Japanese rising star Miyoshi Umeki ( Sayonara) Japanese-Americans Jack Soo and Pat Suzuki Hawaiian-born American Ed Kenney African-American Juanita Hall ( South Pacific) and perhaps most unfortunately, the talented Caucasian American Larry Blyden. As the show's producers, R&H aimed to cast it with actors of Chinese descent, but ultimately found that a sadly insurmountable task. Rodgers and Hammerstein's last two Broadway musicals were, by most metrics, disappointments: 1953's Me and Juliet (358 performances) and 1955's Pipe Dream (245 performances). R&H assembled a top-drawer creative team including director Gene Kelly (making his Broadway directorial debut), choreographer Carol Haney, dance arranger Luther Henderson, and orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett. Lee, the musical by composer Richard Rodgers, lyricist-librettist Oscar Hammerstein II, and Hammerstein's co-librettist Joseph Fields explored themes of cultural assimilation and the generation gap facing a Chinese-American family in San Francisco's Chinatown. (As with the 1959 Broadway cast album of The Sound of Music, the Columbia Records album of Flower Drum Song has reverted to R&H, hence its reissue on Craft.) For now, at least, the LP is exclusive to Barnes and Noble retailers and online store.īased on the novel The Flower Drum Song by Chinese immigrant C.Y. Now, Craft Recordings has celebrated the best of Flower Drum Song - its grand, tuneful score - with a new vinyl reissue of its Original Broadway Cast Recording. It played 600 performances, and yielded a successful London production, a couple of bona fide classic songs, a big-screen adaptation, and one heavily-revised Broadway revival. Instead, when considering the R&H oeuvre, it resides somewhere in between.
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Nor was it one of their three commercial misses ( Allegro, Me and Juliet, Pipe Dream). The 1958 musical wasn't one of the duo's timeless hits ( Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, The Sound of Music).
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Flower Drum Song occupies a unique position in the Rodgers and Hammerstein canon.