By Steven Suskin
After a fair number of years of personally neglecting Flower Drum Song, I find myself going back to it again and again. A score on the level of Carousel or South Pacific? Of course not. But I do like "You Are Beautiful," "A Hundred Million Miracles," "I Am Going to Like It Here," "I Enjoy Being a Girl," "Sunday," and especially "Love Look Away." So I wouldn't ignore Flower Drum Song if you have done so thus far. (If you know the show only from the rewritten 2002 revival, that doesn't count.) Six bonus tracks are added, including three chirpy ones from Florence Henderson. Also, Sandra Church gives us a "Grant Avenue" that sounds suspiciously like a Gypsy Rose Lee strip and might have been intended as something of an audition — a successful one — for the role of Louise in the upcoming musical Gypsy.
HAZEL FLAGG [RCA/Arkiv 05097]
16 Aug 2009
FLOWER DRUM SONG [Sony/Arkiv 50136]
Accompanying the 1964 Music Theater of Lincoln Center revival of The King and I in Arkiv's Rodgers & Hammerstein lineup is the original 1958 cast album of Flower Drum Song. This score has never ranked high among my favorites, either within the works of R&H or in the overall parade of 1950s musicals. Dick and Oscar, in ill-health and having followed the original King and I with two poor musicals (Me and Juliet in 1953 and Pipe Dream in 1955), seemed content to reach for an adequate musical that would please the nondiscriminating. That's what they got with this San Francisco-based look at a generational culture clash. They brought in no less than Gene Kelly to direct (but not choreograph) the show, which turned out not to be much help. Kelly had gotten his big pre-Hollywood break playing Pal Joey for Rodgers in 1940, and had choreographed the 1941 musical Best Foot Forward (which Rodgers co-produced). This did not exactly equip him to direct a Broadway musical, though.
This Sony/Arkiv batch also includes the original cast album of the 1953 Jule Styne musical Hazel Flagg. This recording was discussed in this column at length and highly recommended when it was released in the U.K. in 2004, linked here for your convenience.
ON THE RECORD: Rodgers & Hammerstein's The King and I and Flower Drum Song
(Steven Suskin is author of "The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations" as well as "Second Act Trouble," "Show Tunes" and the "Opening Night on Broadway" books. He can be reached at Ssuskin@aol.com.)
