Chop suey, chop suey!
Living here is very much like chop suey.
Hula hoops and nuclear war,
Doctor Salk and Zsa Zsa Gabor, Bobby Darin, Sandra Dee, and Dewey,
Chop suey! Chop suey!
          --from "Chop Suey," Flower Drum Song

Flower Drum Song is enough to make most Asian American activists cringe: laughs come at the expense of strangely half-assimilated aunties who order fried snake meat from the Ping-Wa Supermarket and fathers who are baffled by the difficulty of arranging propitious marriages for their children in America. The flowering of thousands of years of Chinese culture and arts seems to be the strip show "Fan Tan Fanny." And chop suey, a slapdash dish of miscellany invented by the Chinese in America, might as well be the only thing on the menu.

Playwright David Henry Hwang has received international acclaim for writing plays that speak eloquently on issues of identity. He won a Tony Award for his 1988 Broadway hit M. Butterfly, which points to tragic inaccuracies in Asian stereotypes. So what is he doing reviving Flower Drum Song, the old Chinatown extravaganza by Rodgers and Hammerstein?

"I remember Flower Drum Song as something I really liked as a kid, but which had, by the time I got to college, become something we sort of felt was inaccurate or patronizing," Hwang says. "Yet, I think the work continued to have a certain appeal for a lot of Asian Americans. Even at the time we were protesting it, we were secretly saying, 'I sort of like it.'"

Of all of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, age had been cruelest to Flower Drum Song. While Sound of Music and Oklahoma! had somehow managed to become classics of musical theater, revived again and again all over the world, questions of taste and political correctness had made would-be producers pretty wary of Flower Drum Song. Then Hwang decided to give it another go--and give it a twenty-first century makeover. "I thought, 'Well, the show is not done anymore. It would be interesting to take the songs and try to be true to the intentions of Rodgers and Hammerstein, but also look at Chinatown from the inside-out instead of from the tourist-side view.'"

Hwang's revamped version of Flower Drum Song debuted at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles for a winter 2001-2002 run. It was a huge hit. In fact, Flower Drum Song became the most commercially successful show in the thirty-five-year history of the theater. (It also happened to draw an ethnically diverse, cross-generational crowd.) The show was so popular, a theater spokesman said, that the Taper did something they had never done before--they extended its run and postponed other shows.

And this fall, Flower Drum Song comes to Broadway.

Stepping to the beat of a different drummer

The 'Official Asian American'

As American as chop suey

'We can put Chow Yun-Fat in that'

'Where the next wave should go'

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