page_title: Flower Drum Song
section_title: Casting and tryouts
hierarchical_section_title: Flower Drum Song / Background / Casting and tryouts
caption_attribution_description: 日本語: 梅木 美代志（ナンシー・ウメキ） English: Miyoshi Umeki (1929–2007)
context_page_description: Flower Drum Song was the eighth musical by the team of Rodgers and Hammerstein. It is based on the 1957 novel, The Flower Drum Song, by Chinese-American author C. Y. Lee. It premiered on Broadway in 1958 and was then performed in the West End and on tour. It was adapted for a 1961 musical film.
  After their extraordinary early successes, beginning with Oklahoma! in 1943, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II had written two musicals in the 1950s that did not do well and sought a new hit to revive their fortunes. Lee's novel focuses on a father, Wang Chi-yang, a wealthy refugee from China, who clings to traditional values in San Francisco's Chinatown. Rodgers and Hammerstein shifted the focus of the musical to his son, Wang Ta, who is torn between his Chinese roots and assimilation into American culture. The team hired Gene Kelly to make his debut as a stage director with the musical and scoured the country for a suitable Asian – or at least, plausibly Asian-looking – cast. The musical, much lighter-hearted than Lee's novel, was profitable on Broadway and was followed by a national tour.
context_section_description: According to Rodgers biographer Meryle Secrest, Rodgers, Hammerstein and Fields had hoped to engage Yul Brynner as director.  Brynner, who had gained fame in the team's 1951 hit, The King and I, was an accomplished director.  However, he was busy starring in The Sound and the Fury, and they could not negotiate his release from Twentieth-Century Fox.  Instead, they hired actor and dancer Gene Kelly, who had never directed on stage before.  Kelly felt that the work would not be one of Rodgers and Hammerstein's best, but "as long as I crammed the show brim-full of every joke and gimmick in the book, I could get it to work".
  The three producers sought Chinese, or at least Asian, actors to fill the cast, an idea that was, at the time, considered "very risky".  In the 1950s, there were relatively few Asian-American actors; Rodgers believed that Asians avoided acting because of shyness.  Critics note, in any case, that Asian-Americans "had found few opportunities in mainstream theatre."  Joshua Logan recommended a young Japanese actress, Miyoshi Umeki, whom he had discovered and cast the previous year opposite Marlon Brando in the film Sayonara (for which she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar); she was cast as Mei Li.  They cast Keye Luke, well known as Charlie Chan's Number One Son, as Master Wang.  Rodgers and Hammerstein considered young talent from The King and I who might fit the parts, and came up with teenager Patrick Adiarte, a Filipino-American who had played several of the young princes as he grew up, before finishing as the crown prince, Chulalongkorn.  A talented dancer, he was cast as Wang San, Ta's thoroughly Americanized younger brother.  Pat Suzuki, a Japanese-American who had been interned during World War II, was a recent arrival in New York who had made strong positive impressions for her singing on such television programs as The Tonight Show (with Jack Paar) and The Ed Sullivan Show.  She became the first Linda Low, as Ta's nightclub love interest was renamed.
  The team found it difficult to fill the remaining places in the company with Asian performers, especially in the chorus.  Four other shows with Asian themes had opened or were in rehearsal in New York, and the demand for the few Asian actors was strong.   Kelly and the show's choreographer, Carol Haney, journeyed to cities across the country to seek out talent.  Agents were sent to other cities; in Honolulu, they found nightclub singer and native Hawaiian Ed Kenney, who would originate Wang Ta.  Meanwhile, in New York, the three producers were visiting dance schools.  An advertisement in New York Chinatown newspapers received one response.  No formal audition was held in San Francisco's Chinatown, and the only find was Forbidden City nightclub comedian Goro "Jack" Suzuki (who soon changed his name to Jack Soo), who was cast as Frankie Wing, comedian at Sammy Fong's Celestial Bar.  The role of Fong proved difficult to cast.  Initially, it was given to Larry Storch, a nightclub comic, but during the Boston tryouts, it was given to another Caucasian, Larry Blyden, who was married to Carol Haney, the show's choreographer.  The role of Madam Liang, Master Wang's sister-in-law, fell to Juanita Hall, a light-skinned African American who had played a Tonkinese (Vietnamese) woman, Bloody Mary, in South Pacific. Another African-American performer, Diahann Carroll, was considered for the cast but not hired.  Rodgers later wrote, "what was important was that the actors gave the illusion of being Chinese.  This demonstrates one of the most wonderful things about theatre audiences.  People want to believe what they see on a stage, and they will gladly go along with whatever is done to achieve the desired effect.  Ask them to accept Ezio Pinza as a Frenchman [in South Pacific], Yul Brynner as Siamese and they are prepared to meet you nine tenths of the way even before the curtain goes up."
  When rehearsals began in September 1958, Hammerstein was absent, still recuperating from his surgery.  Rodgers was present, but kept falling asleep.  Hammerstein was told by h
caption: Miyoshi Umeki played Mei Li
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