Playwright David Henry Hwang

By Robert Ito

When East West Players in Los Angeles reached out to David Henry Hwang two years ago about staging one of his works for the theater troupe’s 60th anniversary season, Hwang had a lot of material to choose from.

Maybe “M. Butterfly,” the 1988 Tony-winning work inspired by the true story of a love affair between a French diplomat and a Chinese opera singer, with a nod to Puccini’s opera? Or “Yellow Face,” the Pulitzer-nominated play that skewered “Miss Saigon,” Hollywood racism and even the playwright himself?

Your pick, the theater company told him.

Hwang ultimately chose “Flower Drum Song,” the 1958 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical — or rather, the wholly reworked version he created more than two decades ago.

The original tells the story of Chinese American elders and youngsters in 1950s-era San Francisco Chinatown, quarreling about family obligations and falling in and out of love. The Rodgers and Hammerstein estate had let Hwang rewrite the book for his 2001 show, in part to remedy elements of the musical that had not aged well, like the otherwise peppy song “Chop Suey,” with its nods to Bobby Darin and Hula Hoops.

“The lyric is, ‘living here is very much like chop suey,’ and as an example of what we call either the melting pot or the salad bowl or the great mosaic, it’s not a bad metaphor,” Hwang said in a video interview from his home in New York. “But it was hard to figure out how to make that speak to an audience, even 20 years ago.”

Twenty-five years after his revival premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, “Flower Drum Song” returned this month to the city for a seven-week run. Critics in Los Angeles hailed that earlier production, but the Broadway transfer a year later closed before recouping its investment, despite being nominated for three Tony Awards.

To read the entire article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/28/theater/flower-drum-song-david-henry-hwang.html

Photo credit: Lia Chang, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons