By Kenneth Jones
20 Nov 2009

Columbia College Chicago's Center for Asian Arts and Media will produce the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song in summer 2010.

Baayork Lee, the director and choreographer perhaps most associated with A Chorus Line, will direct the production, which will use the 2002 revised script by Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly), who will serve as creative advisor for the project.

The show will be unveiled in a concert in Washington, DC, in May 2010, in honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (in collaboration with the U.S.-Asia Institute), and be fully produced in Chicago for a month starting in August 2010. In fall 2010, the production will play Shanghai.

Flower Drum Song will have a cast of both Equity and non-Equity actors and ensemble dancers from Broadway and Midwest open auditions.

The 2010 staging is being billed as "the first full musical production presented by and about Asian Americans in the Midwest, where far fewer cultural resources and less support are available to Asian American artists and the representation of Asian Americans in mainstream cultural programming is even scarcer."

The show based on a novel by C.Y. Lee represented a breakthrough at the time: the story of Asian-Americans not as they related to the non-Asian community, but how they existed together as both traditional and assimilated people in their own world, within a larger American culture. The show is set in San Francisco's Chinatown. Assimilation and tradition are major ideas of the musical comedy, particularly in Hwang's rewrite.

The film version had an all-Asian cast, but the Broadway original starred Larry Blyden, a white actor playing an Asian, in a principal role.

Nevertheless, generations of Asian actors would be inspired by the groundbreaking Flower Drum Song appearances of Asian-American stars like Nancy Kwan, James Shigeta and Miyoshi Umeki.

According to the production notes, "Set in San Francisco's Chinatown in the late 1950s, Flower Drum Song is a funny and moving tale that explores what it means to be an American and touches the history of every person whose forebearers once arrived as strangers to these shores. The story centers on Mei-Li, who arrives in America after fleeing communist China. The naïve young refugee is befriended by Wang, who is struggling to keep the Chinese theatrical tradition alive despite his son's determination to turn his theatre into a rowdy nightclub."

Playwright Hwang had always been a fan of the show but "felt the book was bound up in historical sensitivities that did not do justice to the musical's incredible score," according to notes. He developed a new libretto that "modernized the presentation of Asian Americans and made revolutionary and appropriate changes in handling the delicate racial themes of the show." The revival won him his third Tony nomination. (Robert Longbottom was that production's director-choreographer.)

Performances in Chicago will play a four-week run at the Merle Reskin Theatre (previously Blackstone Theatre of the Shubert Organization) at DePaul University, including a one-week preview and a three-week run with daily performances from Thursday through Sunday.

An opening gala, community receptions and post-show discussions will be held in conjunction with the show.

A series of educational programs will take place in various schools, community centers and libraries prior to the opening night.

For more information about the production, which is officially billed as "Visions and Revisions: The Flower Drum Song Project," click here.