Flower Drum Song - Music and Recordings

Music and Recordings

Rodgers and Hammerstein sought to give the new work an Eastern flavor, without using existing oriental music. According to Ben Brantley in his review of the 2002 Broadway revival, the use by Rodgers "of repetitive Eastern musical structures gives the numbers a sing-song catchiness that, for better or worse, exerts a sticky hold on the memory." The most oriental-sounding song in the work is "A Hundred Million Miracles", which provides the eight-note drumbeat which is the musical signature of the work from overture to curtain. Hammerstein wrote Mei Li's first act song, "I Am Going to Like It Here", in a Malaysian poetic form called pantoum in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the next. One critic thought that the 2001 version's orchestrations "boast more Asian accents and a jazzier edge than the original", but another felt that they "pale in comparison" to Bennett's typically lilting sound.

As with many of Rodgers and Hammerstein's musicals, the work features a ballet at the start of the second act, choreographed in the original production by Carol Haney. The ballet dramatizes the confused romantic longings of Wang Ta towards the women in his life, and ends as he awakens in Helen Chao's bed. Thomas Hischak, in his The Rodgers and Hammerstein Encyclopedia, notes that the ballets in Oklahoma! and Carousel (choreographed by Agnes de Mille) broke new ground in illustrating facets of the characters beyond what is learned in songs and dialogue, but describes the ballet in Flower Drum Song as "pleasant but not memorable". Although Hischak describes Rodgers as "the greatest waltz composer America has ever seen", Flower Drum Song was the first Rodgers and Hammerstein musical not to feature one.

Several of the characters are given "I am" songs that introduce them to the audience, allowing the character to express his dreams or desires and for onlookers to establish empathy with the character. Linda Low, for example, expresses her self-confidence with "I Enjoy Being a Girl"; we learn Mei Li's hopes with the quieter "I Am Going to Like It Here". Although not a formal musical number, the brief "You Be the Rock, I'll Be the Roll", sung and danced by Linda and by Wang San, Ta's Americanized teenage brother, was described by Lewis as "virtually the first self-consciously rock and roll ditty ever sung" in a Broadway musical. Patrick Adiarte, who originated the role of Wang San, however, saw it as "corny stuff ... put in there to get a laugh". Helen Chao's sad "Love, Look Away" is described by Lewis as "arguably the most tautly crafted blues song Dick and Oscar ever wrote".

Having decided that record companies were profiting more from the sales of their cast albums than they were, Rodgers and Hammerstein formed their own record company to produce the cast recording for the original production of Flower Drum Song. The album sold a relatively modest 300,000 copies, compared with sales of over a million copies for Rodgers and Hammerstein's next and final musical, The Sound of Music. Still, it was certified as a gold record for having at least a million dollars in sales, and it spent 67 weeks in the U.S. Top 40, three of them at number 1, and also did well in the UK when the show opened there in 1960. The original cast album is relatively complete, even including parts of the Wedding Parade, though it does not include the ballet.

In 1960, the London cast recording was released. According to Hischak, the individual performers do not sing as well as the New York cast; the London recording's strong points are the nightclub numbers. The 1961 album from the film uses a larger orchestra and, according to Hischak, has a fuller sound than the Broadway recording. It features dubbing by the opera singer Marilyn Horne ("Love, Look Away") and band singer B. J. Baker (for Linda Low's songs). A cast album for Hwang's revision was released in 2002 featuring strong performances from Lea Salonga as Mei-li and Jose Llana as Wang Ta. This was nominated for a Grammy, though it did not win. Hischak notes that it is unfair to compare the later version with its earlier predecessors, as Hwang's version "has some of the dark corners and richness of a musical play".