We first heard about the show “Getting to Know You: Rodgers and Asia” a while or so before it took place. We had seen several shows put on by East West Players, most of them musicals in which our cousin, Marc Macalintal, had either played a part or, more recently, served as musical director. It was he who informed us of this latest show via mass notice on Facebook. It sounded interesting because it took place on my birthday. We didn’t have plans for my birthday itself but we had plans to celebrate a few days earlier with dinner at the Palace and the Loggins and Messina concert (see earlier reviews). The Rodgers and Asia show was part of a series of shows put on at theaters all over the L.A. area and produced by Reprise Theater Company. They each portrayed different aspects of the musicals composed by Richard Rodgers. These were all in response to the City of L.A. declaring October as “Richard Rodgers Month”.
When Marc first sent the link via Facebook we followed it to the Reprise Theater Company website. It said the tickets cost $50. Since this was above our budget, we decided not to go. We figured I would have a low-key birthday after all our celebrating on October 2. On my actual birthday I logged onto Facebook to thank people for sending me birthday wishes. When I did I saw that Marc had posted a notice that the Rodgers and Asia show tickets now cost only $20.00 with a special discount code he gave. This was more affordable than the original $50 and we still didn’t have any plans for that evening. We weren’t exactly sure what the “show” was, only that Marc was the musical director. The Reprise website described it as a “symposium including musical performances.” I think we also read that Jennifer Paz would be one of the performers. We had recently seen her in East West Players’ production of “The Last Five Years” (see earlier review). My wife had also seen her in the 2001 revival of “Flower Drum Song”, one of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals to be discussed at the symposium along with “The King and I” and “South Pacific”. Those are the three Rodgers musicals that feature Asia, Asians, and/or Asian Americans.
We got the tickets online through the Reprise theater website for only $22 each including the processing fee. The site let us just print them out. The show started at 8 pm at the David Henry Hwang Theater where we had seen all the other East West Players productions. Luckily, I had also taken a vacation day on the day after my birthday. We left home at 7:10 pm and arrived at the theater in Downtown L.A. at 7:50 pm going against traffic most of the way. As we drove northwest on the 101, we saw the new Gold Line light rail train track. Just before we went under it we saw the new light rail train slowly moving across it. I don’t think the train was actually running yet; they were still testing it. It didn’t actually open for use until sometime in November 2009. As we exited the 101 onto Alameda we caught a glimpse of one of the new Gold Line stations. It had these large shades that looked a bit like mushrooms.
When we arrived we had to pay $7 to park in the expansive lot near the theater. We entered the theater and climbed the stairs to the first level to get to the floor seats. When we bought the tickets online there were a few floor seats open and all the balcony seats available. We knew from the last time we attended a show at the theater that the balcony had a high rail that sometimes obscured the view. We got a couple of the last available floor in around the second or third row from the back on the left side. After we sat down we saw Marc’s wife sitting in the same row as us on the other end. This is probably the second time we happened to sit in the same row as her. An earlier time was when we saw the three Filipino Tenors in December 2007. The place was already crowded. The stage was set for the play currently playing at East West Players, “Art”, with a white backdrop and a white spiral staircase. For the symposium there were five folding chairs, each with a microphone on them and two mikes on stands for the singers. On the right side of the stage was a piano. Most people in the audience were dressed slightly formal or business casual.
At 8:10 pm, the panelists, singers, and Marc came out and took their places. A woman introduced herself as Susan Deitz, the producing artistic director for Reprise Theater Company. She mentioned that this symposium and the other Rodgers-related shows being held around the area are in response to the City of L.A. declaring October as “Richard Rodgers Month.” She then introduced David Henry Hwang (DHH) who would moderate the symposium. She mentioned that DHH was her student at the Harvard School (now called Harvard-Westlake). DHH was seated in the fifth chair from the left and said he hoped this show would receive high marks from his former teacher. Now I’ve seen the theater’s namesake. I thought he would be older but he didn’t look much older than us. The program said he won a Tony award for the play “M. Butterfly” that sounded familiar to me.
Jennifer Paz then sang “Getting to Know You” from “The King and I” with Marc accompanying on piano. The song begins with a quote about teaching. After the performance, David Henry Hwang began the symposium by describing how Rodgers and Hammerstein had six hit musicals and three of them involved Asians and/or Asian Americans and, as of present day, “King and I” was still banned in Thailand. He then introduced the panelists. First was Lucy Burns, assistant professor of Asian American studies at UCLA. The next panelist, C.Y. Lee, got applause at the mention of his name. He wrote the novel on which the musical “Flower Drum Song” is based. Nobuko Miyamoto was involved in early Broadway and film productions of “King and I” and “Flower Drum Song”. According to DHH, she went on to become “the inventor of Asian American art.” Christina Klein is a professor of Asian and English studies at Boston University. DHH then introduced the singers: Jose Llana who was in the original production of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” and Jennifer Paz who was then currently in “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” at Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theater and had flown down for the symposium. DHH mentioned that he had worked with both singers in his revival of “Flower Drum Song”. We noticed that DHH did not introduced Marc at this point, though he was partially obscured from the audience by the piano.
Christina Klein was the first panelist to speak. She described how Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals were produced at a point when the Eastern and Western cultures were starting to warm to each other. The old view was contained in a quote by Kipling: “East is East. West is West.” (i.e. they remain separate). But with the U.S. involved in Asia in World War II, their involvement in the Philippines since the beginning of the 20th Century, and the Chinese immigration to the U.S. since the 19th Century, people from the East and the West were finding that they had more in common. Klein noted that the relations between Americans and Asians in “South Pacific” and “King and I” ultimately do not work out other than Nelly’s acceptance of the half-islander children of the Frenchman in the former. Now I know where the quote “East is East” comes from that went on to be the title of a T.C. Boyle book and the title of an unrelated film, I believe.
Jose Llana then sang and Marc accompanied “Appuzzlement” from “King and I” where the king of Siam expresses his frustration with ruling during challenging times. He got very worked up and expressive and the piano music corresponded to that perfectly. When they finished, Jose Llana gave Marc a thumbs up. Lucy Burns from UCLA spoke next and described works that were inspired by or retold the three Rodgers Broadway musicals that included Asians and/or Asian Americans. I think one work she described was called “Broadwasian”. They all seemed strange and obscure.
After Burns finished speaking, David Henry Hwang said they were going to focus on “Flower Drum Song”. Llana and Paz then sang the duet “Chop Suey” from that musical. It was a playful and silly song that I think someone later mentioned wasn’t even about Chop Suey. Marc’s playful piano playing reflected the song’s mood. DHH then turned the floor over to C.Y. Lee saying that he (Lee) still writes every day (making him DHH’s hero) and asked Lee to describe the path from experience to novel to musical with “Flower Drum Song”. Lee seemed to ignore this request and first mentioned that he was 95 years old, almost completely deaf, losing his memory, and afraid he would make a fool of himself. Reading from his notes he described the changing perceptions of Asians by Americans from a sideshow attraction in the early 19th Century, to cheap railroad labor in the mid to late 1800’s to more general acceptance in the 20th Century thanks to Pearl Buck, James Michener, and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Lee then told a story about when he was helping David Henry Hwang promote his production of “Flower Drum Song” in 2001 or 2002 in New York and they were giving a similar talk. Someone had asked DHH why he had removed the character Helen Chan from the story and what happened to her. DHH told the asker that they’d have to read the book to find out happened to her. He then asked Lee if he wanted to say anything about it and Lee said, “Helen Chan committed suicide.” Driving back to the hotel afterward to their hotel afterward, Lee and his daughter wondered how many more books they would have sold if he hadn’t heard incorrectly and said what happened to Helen Chan.
David Henry Hwang then talked about his experience producing “Flower Drum Song”. He mentioned that it was the first and only Broadway musical so far about Asian Americans. When it was made into a film in the 1950’s, it was the first film with an all Asian American cast. The next one, “The Joy Luck Club” did not come out until the 1990’s. DHH rewrote the musical “Flower Drum Song”, modernized it, and made it a bit darker and more consistent with the novel. His “revisical” of “Flower Drum Song”, as he called it, premiered at the Mark Taper Forum and did well there. It then went to Broadway, got mixed reviews, and lasted less than a year. Since then there have been productions of his version in places such as St. Paul, Minnesota, and more recently in Manila, Philippines.
The focus then shifted to South Pacific with Jose Llana singing and Marc accompanying “You’ve got to be Carefully Taught,” a fairly short song. After the song it was Nobuko Miyamoto’s turn to speak. She first indicated that the T-shirt she wore was for the 40th anniversary of the Basement Workshop in New York, an arts organization that she helped found. In the 1950’s, Miyamoto danced in the film version of “King and I” and in the original Broadway production of “Flower Drum Song”. She became dissatisfied with only Asian roles so she auditioned for “West Side Story” and got the part of Francesca. She spoke very expressively and dramatically though she wasn’t quite as expressive as C.Y. Lee. I think before she spoke DHH said it was an honor to finally get to meet her. After she finished, Jennifer Paz sang “Happy Talk” from “South Pacific”, a song that my wife was not familiar with. I knew it because, of the three musicals discussed, “South Pacific” was the only one I had seen: a high school production during my sophomore year. After “Happy Talk”, DHH acknowledged and thanked Marc, the musical director.
Both Jose Llana and Jennifer Paz sang the next song that included dialogue with piano accompaniment by Marc and separate solos. It was from “Flower Drum Song” and I hadn’t heard it before. It mentioned something about the story of a flower boat. After the song, DHH thanked the panelists, singers, and Marc, and then asked if there were any questions. Someone asked why Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote three musicals that included Asians and/or Asian Americans. Christina Klein said something about the U.S. taking more notice of Asia after World War II and China turning Communist. Nobuko Miyamoto mentioned that Americans viewed Asians as exotic and since Rodgers and Hammerstein were Jewish, they could relate to a persecuted culture. DHHH asked a question about whether present-day advances in Asian roles become the future’s stereotypes. Jennifer Paz mentioned something about an Asian-American group overreacting to a movie. Jose Llana said something about Asian Americans being more included because “more people know them” as friends and acquaintances. He gave an example of a friend that included a character like him (Jose) in his novel. His comments seemed to underscore that it’s more about “who you know” then “what you know”. Llana qualified his and Paz’s statements by saying, “We sing." DHH said he recently read a fictional story about a character who calls a suicide hotline that has been outsourced to India. The last question was someone asking DHH if he planned to produce another “revisical”. He said he had no revisical ideas but wanted to do something to revive interest in Pearl Buck who he felt had been neglected recently.
The symposium ended after that last question. We said hi to Marc’s wife who was there with a friend from high school. We all went to the stage to say hi to Marc. We noticed that his hands were sweaty from playing the piano. He was glad we came. We left soon after.
This was a fun and informative way to spend my birthday evening. I enjoyed the performance of the song “Appuzzlement” the best. Of the talks, I most enjoyed C.Y. Lee. Now I know who the East West Players theater is named after. For my past three birthdays, I’ve done something that required a printed ticket so I have a printed ticket for each one: the film Into the Wild in 2007, the James concert at the House of Blues Anaheim in 2008 (see earlier review) and now the Rodgers and Asia symposium in 2009. The question is: what will be my birthday ticket in 2010?
When Marc first sent the link via Facebook we followed it to the Reprise Theater Company website. It said the tickets cost $50. Since this was above our budget, we decided not to go. We figured I would have a low-key birthday after all our celebrating on October 2. On my actual birthday I logged onto Facebook to thank people for sending me birthday wishes. When I did I saw that Marc had posted a notice that the Rodgers and Asia show tickets now cost only $20.00 with a special discount code he gave. This was more affordable than the original $50 and we still didn’t have any plans for that evening. We weren’t exactly sure what the “show” was, only that Marc was the musical director. The Reprise website described it as a “symposium including musical performances.” I think we also read that Jennifer Paz would be one of the performers. We had recently seen her in East West Players’ production of “The Last Five Years” (see earlier review). My wife had also seen her in the 2001 revival of “Flower Drum Song”, one of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals to be discussed at the symposium along with “The King and I” and “South Pacific”. Those are the three Rodgers musicals that feature Asia, Asians, and/or Asian Americans.
We got the tickets online through the Reprise theater website for only $22 each including the processing fee. The site let us just print them out. The show started at 8 pm at the David Henry Hwang Theater where we had seen all the other East West Players productions. Luckily, I had also taken a vacation day on the day after my birthday. We left home at 7:10 pm and arrived at the theater in Downtown L.A. at 7:50 pm going against traffic most of the way. As we drove northwest on the 101, we saw the new Gold Line light rail train track. Just before we went under it we saw the new light rail train slowly moving across it. I don’t think the train was actually running yet; they were still testing it. It didn’t actually open for use until sometime in November 2009. As we exited the 101 onto Alameda we caught a glimpse of one of the new Gold Line stations. It had these large shades that looked a bit like mushrooms.
When we arrived we had to pay $7 to park in the expansive lot near the theater. We entered the theater and climbed the stairs to the first level to get to the floor seats. When we bought the tickets online there were a few floor seats open and all the balcony seats available. We knew from the last time we attended a show at the theater that the balcony had a high rail that sometimes obscured the view. We got a couple of the last available floor in around the second or third row from the back on the left side. After we sat down we saw Marc’s wife sitting in the same row as us on the other end. This is probably the second time we happened to sit in the same row as her. An earlier time was when we saw the three Filipino Tenors in December 2007. The place was already crowded. The stage was set for the play currently playing at East West Players, “Art”, with a white backdrop and a white spiral staircase. For the symposium there were five folding chairs, each with a microphone on them and two mikes on stands for the singers. On the right side of the stage was a piano. Most people in the audience were dressed slightly formal or business casual.
At 8:10 pm, the panelists, singers, and Marc came out and took their places. A woman introduced herself as Susan Deitz, the producing artistic director for Reprise Theater Company. She mentioned that this symposium and the other Rodgers-related shows being held around the area are in response to the City of L.A. declaring October as “Richard Rodgers Month.” She then introduced David Henry Hwang (DHH) who would moderate the symposium. She mentioned that DHH was her student at the Harvard School (now called Harvard-Westlake). DHH was seated in the fifth chair from the left and said he hoped this show would receive high marks from his former teacher. Now I’ve seen the theater’s namesake. I thought he would be older but he didn’t look much older than us. The program said he won a Tony award for the play “M. Butterfly” that sounded familiar to me.
Jennifer Paz then sang “Getting to Know You” from “The King and I” with Marc accompanying on piano. The song begins with a quote about teaching. After the performance, David Henry Hwang began the symposium by describing how Rodgers and Hammerstein had six hit musicals and three of them involved Asians and/or Asian Americans and, as of present day, “King and I” was still banned in Thailand. He then introduced the panelists. First was Lucy Burns, assistant professor of Asian American studies at UCLA. The next panelist, C.Y. Lee, got applause at the mention of his name. He wrote the novel on which the musical “Flower Drum Song” is based. Nobuko Miyamoto was involved in early Broadway and film productions of “King and I” and “Flower Drum Song”. According to DHH, she went on to become “the inventor of Asian American art.” Christina Klein is a professor of Asian and English studies at Boston University. DHH then introduced the singers: Jose Llana who was in the original production of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” and Jennifer Paz who was then currently in “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” at Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theater and had flown down for the symposium. DHH mentioned that he had worked with both singers in his revival of “Flower Drum Song”. We noticed that DHH did not introduced Marc at this point, though he was partially obscured from the audience by the piano.
Christina Klein was the first panelist to speak. She described how Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals were produced at a point when the Eastern and Western cultures were starting to warm to each other. The old view was contained in a quote by Kipling: “East is East. West is West.” (i.e. they remain separate). But with the U.S. involved in Asia in World War II, their involvement in the Philippines since the beginning of the 20th Century, and the Chinese immigration to the U.S. since the 19th Century, people from the East and the West were finding that they had more in common. Klein noted that the relations between Americans and Asians in “South Pacific” and “King and I” ultimately do not work out other than Nelly’s acceptance of the half-islander children of the Frenchman in the former. Now I know where the quote “East is East” comes from that went on to be the title of a T.C. Boyle book and the title of an unrelated film, I believe.
Jose Llana then sang and Marc accompanied “Appuzzlement” from “King and I” where the king of Siam expresses his frustration with ruling during challenging times. He got very worked up and expressive and the piano music corresponded to that perfectly. When they finished, Jose Llana gave Marc a thumbs up. Lucy Burns from UCLA spoke next and described works that were inspired by or retold the three Rodgers Broadway musicals that included Asians and/or Asian Americans. I think one work she described was called “Broadwasian”. They all seemed strange and obscure.
After Burns finished speaking, David Henry Hwang said they were going to focus on “Flower Drum Song”. Llana and Paz then sang the duet “Chop Suey” from that musical. It was a playful and silly song that I think someone later mentioned wasn’t even about Chop Suey. Marc’s playful piano playing reflected the song’s mood. DHH then turned the floor over to C.Y. Lee saying that he (Lee) still writes every day (making him DHH’s hero) and asked Lee to describe the path from experience to novel to musical with “Flower Drum Song”. Lee seemed to ignore this request and first mentioned that he was 95 years old, almost completely deaf, losing his memory, and afraid he would make a fool of himself. Reading from his notes he described the changing perceptions of Asians by Americans from a sideshow attraction in the early 19th Century, to cheap railroad labor in the mid to late 1800’s to more general acceptance in the 20th Century thanks to Pearl Buck, James Michener, and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Lee then told a story about when he was helping David Henry Hwang promote his production of “Flower Drum Song” in 2001 or 2002 in New York and they were giving a similar talk. Someone had asked DHH why he had removed the character Helen Chan from the story and what happened to her. DHH told the asker that they’d have to read the book to find out happened to her. He then asked Lee if he wanted to say anything about it and Lee said, “Helen Chan committed suicide.” Driving back to the hotel afterward to their hotel afterward, Lee and his daughter wondered how many more books they would have sold if he hadn’t heard incorrectly and said what happened to Helen Chan.
David Henry Hwang then talked about his experience producing “Flower Drum Song”. He mentioned that it was the first and only Broadway musical so far about Asian Americans. When it was made into a film in the 1950’s, it was the first film with an all Asian American cast. The next one, “The Joy Luck Club” did not come out until the 1990’s. DHH rewrote the musical “Flower Drum Song”, modernized it, and made it a bit darker and more consistent with the novel. His “revisical” of “Flower Drum Song”, as he called it, premiered at the Mark Taper Forum and did well there. It then went to Broadway, got mixed reviews, and lasted less than a year. Since then there have been productions of his version in places such as St. Paul, Minnesota, and more recently in Manila, Philippines.
The focus then shifted to South Pacific with Jose Llana singing and Marc accompanying “You’ve got to be Carefully Taught,” a fairly short song. After the song it was Nobuko Miyamoto’s turn to speak. She first indicated that the T-shirt she wore was for the 40th anniversary of the Basement Workshop in New York, an arts organization that she helped found. In the 1950’s, Miyamoto danced in the film version of “King and I” and in the original Broadway production of “Flower Drum Song”. She became dissatisfied with only Asian roles so she auditioned for “West Side Story” and got the part of Francesca. She spoke very expressively and dramatically though she wasn’t quite as expressive as C.Y. Lee. I think before she spoke DHH said it was an honor to finally get to meet her. After she finished, Jennifer Paz sang “Happy Talk” from “South Pacific”, a song that my wife was not familiar with. I knew it because, of the three musicals discussed, “South Pacific” was the only one I had seen: a high school production during my sophomore year. After “Happy Talk”, DHH acknowledged and thanked Marc, the musical director.
Both Jose Llana and Jennifer Paz sang the next song that included dialogue with piano accompaniment by Marc and separate solos. It was from “Flower Drum Song” and I hadn’t heard it before. It mentioned something about the story of a flower boat. After the song, DHH thanked the panelists, singers, and Marc, and then asked if there were any questions. Someone asked why Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote three musicals that included Asians and/or Asian Americans. Christina Klein said something about the U.S. taking more notice of Asia after World War II and China turning Communist. Nobuko Miyamoto mentioned that Americans viewed Asians as exotic and since Rodgers and Hammerstein were Jewish, they could relate to a persecuted culture. DHHH asked a question about whether present-day advances in Asian roles become the future’s stereotypes. Jennifer Paz mentioned something about an Asian-American group overreacting to a movie. Jose Llana said something about Asian Americans being more included because “more people know them” as friends and acquaintances. He gave an example of a friend that included a character like him (Jose) in his novel. His comments seemed to underscore that it’s more about “who you know” then “what you know”. Llana qualified his and Paz’s statements by saying, “We sing." DHH said he recently read a fictional story about a character who calls a suicide hotline that has been outsourced to India. The last question was someone asking DHH if he planned to produce another “revisical”. He said he had no revisical ideas but wanted to do something to revive interest in Pearl Buck who he felt had been neglected recently.
The symposium ended after that last question. We said hi to Marc’s wife who was there with a friend from high school. We all went to the stage to say hi to Marc. We noticed that his hands were sweaty from playing the piano. He was glad we came. We left soon after.
This was a fun and informative way to spend my birthday evening. I enjoyed the performance of the song “Appuzzlement” the best. Of the talks, I most enjoyed C.Y. Lee. Now I know who the East West Players theater is named after. For my past three birthdays, I’ve done something that required a printed ticket so I have a printed ticket for each one: the film Into the Wild in 2007, the James concert at the House of Blues Anaheim in 2008 (see earlier review) and now the Rodgers and Asia symposium in 2009. The question is: what will be my birthday ticket in 2010?
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