Mu Performing Arts revives a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, 'Flower Drum Song'
Mu Performing Arts delivers a sweet, engaging retelling of a Rodgers and Hammerstein story of lives in transition.
By Quinton Skinner
Special to the Pioneer Press
Updated: 06/28/2009 09:01:19 PM CDT

When onetime Chinese opera purist Wang, Randy Reyes, takes the stage midway through Mu Performing Arts' "Flower Drum Song," the staid patriarch has donned a shiny white jumpsuit with the words Chop Suey stitched across it.
His son Ta, Sherwin Resurreccion, who had been pushing Dad to get with the times, blanches and wonders if he has hatched an Oriental minstrel show.
That's the push-pull of Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical with an updated book by David Henry Hwang: tradition versus assimilation, art against commerce, and the true voice of the heart pitched against the static of worldly distraction. It's an odd show, not exactly brimming with logic, but Mu extracts a sweetness and soul from the material that renders it largely winning.
Our heroine is Mei-Li, Sara Ochs, radiating tender pluckiness, whose father is dispensed in the opening number, after he criticizes Mao. Mei-Li makes her way to San Francisco. She turns up at the Golden Pearl Theater, run by Wang, and signs on to perform in traditional Chinese operas. Ta prefers to spend his Friday nights at a club featuring song and dance; Mei-Li, early on, prefers Ta.
Ta, a familiar sort of fool, has eyes only for Linda, Laurine Price, and has little fascination for Mei-Li's just-off-the-boat charms. With the arrival of Madame Rita, Melissa Bechthold, things get interesting: Rita promotes a vision of a new Chinatown, and just when you think papa Wang couldn't get any stodgier, the old fellow becomes an unrepentant showboat and the toast of the town.

Rick Shiomi's direction plays to his performers' strengths. Reyes lends consistent, comedic touches to his fuddy-duddy turned gadfly, and Resurreccion manages to impart complexity to a young character in search of authenticity. The pair enjoy a brief sequence toward the end, an imperfect father obliquely explaining things to a flawed son, that rings with truth. Ochs possesses a particular sort of transcendent sweetness that keeps Mei-Li's travails at the center of our concerns.

In the end, the story works out nicely for just about everyone, then a left-field gambit shatters the show's artifice and personalizes each of the performers — briefly breaking them free of their roles. It's sentimental, if nicely done, and it serves as a decent solution to the show's limitations, a real-life breakthrough of the sort Rodgers and Hammerstein undoubtedly strove for in their conception so many years ago.
Great art should move from the particular to the universal. This piece tracks in the right direction, nearly gets there and provides ample diversion along the way.