Play: Flower Drum Song

Overview
Flower Drum Song is a 1958 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical adapted from C.Y. Lee's novel that dramatizes the lives of Chinese-American families in San Francisco's Chinatown. The show blends buoyant Broadway melodies and romantic comedy with serious concerns about cultural change, identity, and the friction between immigrant parents and their American-born children. Notable songs include "I Enjoy Being a Girl" and the plaintive ballad "Love, Look Away," which capture both the show's playful and wistful tones.

Plot
The story follows a newly arrived young woman from China whose arrival sets off a chain of romantic entanglements and family reckonings among local Chinese-American residents. She becomes involved with a young man who is torn between filial duty and his attraction to modern American life, while older family members struggle to preserve traditional customs and authority. Through a series of misunderstandings, matchmakings, and public performances, relationships are tested and the characters are forced to negotiate who they are and what they want in a rapidly changing social landscape.

Themes and Music
At its heart the piece examines assimilation and generational conflict: parents who cling to homeland conventions confront children shaped by American values, and both sides must reckon with compromise and loss. Gender and performance are also central concerns, as female characters navigate expectations of modesty and modern independence; "I Enjoy Being a Girl" highlights the costume-and-act aspect of femininity, while "Love, Look Away" voices deeper private longing. Musically, Richard Rodgers' score blends Broadway lyricism with musical gestures that suggest Chinese sonorities, creating an accessible yet culturally inflected sound that supports both comedic set pieces and tender moments.

Characters and Staging
The show places community life and spectacle side by side, moving between intimate household scenes and lively nightclub or street tableaux where choreography and costume emphasize the clash and fusion of cultures. Characters are drawn as distinct archetypes, traditional elders, eager young romantics, and show-business opportunists, whose interactions reveal the pressures of assimilation and the performative aspects of identity. The original Broadway production cast and staging showcased Asian-American performers in principal roles, a distinguishing feature at a time when leading parts for nonwhite actors were scarce.

Legacy
Flower Drum Song was a commercial success and notable for putting Asian-American characters and performers on a major Broadway stage, but it has provoked mixed reactions over time. Praise for its charm, memorable songs, and sympathetic portrayal of immigrant aspirations sits alongside criticism that some characterizations and plot devices rely on period stereotypes and simplify complex cultural realities. Later revivals and revisions have sought to retain the musical's strengths while reworking the book to give characters greater depth and contemporary relevance. The show remains an important milestone in American musical theater for bringing immigrant narratives into mainstream Broadway storytelling.