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Saturday, October 11, 2003
'Flower Drum' blooms in staging and lead voices
"Flower Drum Song" is a picturesque, prettified rendering of gritty characters and stories.
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The songs are nice enough but not memorable. The performers' talents are uneven. The romantic leads, played by Yuka Takara and Jose Llana, have strong, dramatic voices. But some of the supporting players in the 5th Avenue Musical Theatre production are clearly not professional singers.
"Flower Drum Song" is a romantic tale of Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, 1960. The basis for the story is a 1957 novel by Chin Y. Lee. It was adapted for the stage by Joseph Fields, further adapted by Oscar Hammerstein II and then further adapted for last year's Broadway revival by David Henry Hwang.
A lot of filtering and diluting has taken place since a generally dark novel was brightened into a 1958 Broadway show and then further brightened for a 1961 movie and then darkened a bit for the 2002 revival.
In any event boy (Llana) meets girl (Takara). Boy loses girl. Boy gets
girl. Complications include boy thinking he really wants some other girl (a sassy glamour puss played by Emily Tsu). Also, girl almost settles for an ardent but unromantic suitor (a proud, angry and disappointed immigrant played by Bobby Pestka).
The setting is a Peking-style opera house in Chinatown. Under the boy's guidance, the place becomes a razzle-dazzle nightclub featuring for-the-tourists floor shows in which Las Vegas meets the exotic Far East. Along the way, the boy's traditionalist father becomes a gung-ho showbiz maker and shaker. (The girl's father, an opera impresario, had been persecuted and killed by bullying Maoists.)
As with any backstage musical -- "42nd Street," "A Chorus Line," "La Cage aux Folles," you name it -- the theatrical milieu provides a pretext for fancy production numbers.
At its best, this "Flower Drum Song" production makes the most of picturesque, though sketchy, material. The girl's escape from China is rendered by director/choreographer Robert Longbottom as a series of stylized melodramas acted out within a frame of gliding bamboo poles. Costumes by Gregg Barnes showcase gaudy Peking opera regalia and naughty floor show eye candy.
Then, totally predictable but hastily contrived, comes the happy ending.
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