“Flower Drum Song” was a bit of an oddity in the careers of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.
The 1958 musical — about the assimilation of Chinese immigrants in San Francisco — was a critical and box-office hit in its day, but over the years it has fallen off the Broadway radar.
The R&H superhits — “Oklahoma!,” “Carousel,” “The Sound of Music” et al — are always being revived somewhere.
“Flower Drum Song” introduced at least one major pop charts hit — “I Enjoy Being a Girl” — but the show has only been revived on Broadway once (unsuccessfully in 2002) and even hardcore show music fans rarely talk about it.
What’s the problem with “Flower Drum Song”?
Well, the show’s once cutting-edge racial tolerance stance now seems a bit patronizing and the pre-feminist view of women is more un-PC here than in any other R&H show. (The lyrics for “I Enjoy Being a Girl” are enough to cause Gloria Steinem to wake up screaming: “I’m strictly a female female/And my future I hope will be/In the home of a brave and free male/Who’ll enjoy being a guy having a girl… like… me.”)
Like Stephen Sondheim’s 1976 flop, “Pacific Overtures,” the R&H musical focused on an Asian cultural demographic that has never shown much interest in Broadway musicals, so “Flower Drum Song” must have been a challenge to market even in its own day.
One sign of the show’s Anglo view of Chinese culture was the fact that most of the star roles in the original company were filled by Japanese-Americans.
Because the show is not very well known, the new expanded CD version of “Flower Drum Song” from Masterworks Broadway will be a revelation for younger show music fans.
I wrote in this space last month about the genius of producer Goddard Lieberson who turned the original cast album into an art form in the late 1950s and on into the 1960s and ’70s. Lieberson was president of Columbia Records and he could have left the grotty studio work to underlings, but he loved Broadway and loved producing recordings that did justice to musical theater. His legacy to us includes the original cast recordings of “My Fair Lady,” “Camelot” and “Gypsy,” among many others
Six days after “Flower Drum Song” opened on Dec. 1, 1958, Lieberson brought the orchestra and cast into Columbia’s 30th Street Studio for a marathon recording session and the result is this magnificent CD which has been beautifully remastered so that it sounds as fresh and as “theatrical” as ever.
The six bonus tracks illustrate the linkage between Broadway and pop music a half-century ago when a good proportion of hit songs came from show scores (let’s not forget that even The Beatles included “Til There Was You” from “The Music Man” on one of their early albums). On the “Flower Drum Song” CD we get to hear a then very young singer named Florence Henderson’s terrific version of “I Enjoy Being a Girl” and show star Pat Suzuki’s pop recording of “Love, Look Away.”
(The new CD is available exclusively through www.ArkivMusic.com)
