‘Flower Drum Song’ moves to a new beat at AMT

“To create something new, we first must love what is old.”

David Henry Hwang embodies that line from “Flower Drum Song” with his radical new revival of the vintage Rodgers-and-Hammerstein musical, which runs through Nov. 9 at American Musical Theatre of San Jose.

The playwright has breathed fresh air into the old-fashioned tale of Mei Li, a young Chinese refugee who makes a new life in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where her head is turned by the fusion of East and West on Grant Avenue.

“Being able to take this piece back to life — (which) remains to this day the only Broadway musical about Asian-Americans, ever — being able to bring it back to life was very gratifying,” says Hwang, famed for his plays about the Asian-American experience, from “FOB” to “M. Butterfly.” He is also noted for his work on Disney musicals such as “Aida” and “Tarzan” (which is coming to AMT next year). “Now the show has a life.”

As a teenager growing up in Los Angeles, Hwang loved the quaint 1961 Hollywood movie version, which he discovered on late-night TV. Looking back now at the age of 51, he realizes that he may not have been the most discerning viewer. He was simply thrilled to see faces like his on the big screen, to see Asian-Americans as the stars of the piece, and not as the sidekicks or villains. Indeed, “Flower Drum” became a touchstone for an entire generation of Asian-Americans.

“For baby boomers like myself, this was nothing short of revolutionary,” says Hwang, the nation’s most prominent Asian-American playwright. “When I was a kid, Asian-Americans were considered poor and ill-educated. We were cooks, waiters and laundrymen. We’ve gone an extraordinary 180-degree shift since then. Now we’re too educated, and we break the curve in math class.”

Later, while a budding playwright in college at Stanford University, his eyes were opened to how dated the show was, how stereotypical its portrait of Asian-Americans really was. How can you help cringe at a song like “I Enjoy Being a Girl?”

“The show fell off the radar, because people objected to it politically and because producers thought it was creaky dramaturgically. It wasn’t one of the strongest Hammerstein books,” he says, over the phone from New York, where he now makes his home. “I wanted to return to the spirit of C.Y. Lee’s novel, which was much more bittersweet about the joys and challenges of immigration and assimilation than the movie version.”

It could take a hundred million miracles to update what many consider a cultural relic. But Hwang has never been one to back down from a challenge. As it happens, he has made his name deconstructing the politics of race and identity on stage, from the Tony-winning “M. Butterfly” and “Golden Child” to “Yellow Face,” which was workshopped at Stanford and is slated for a Berkeley Rep run next season.

As actor Francis Jue, who has starred in many of Hwang’s works, once put it: “For me, Hwang’s work has been a seminal part of being Asian-American in this culture. It’s about feeling alienated in your own country.”

So who better to give “Flower Drum” a makeover? Hwang cracked open his tool kit for the 2002 Broadway revival and soon realized that the show was more than just a fixer-upper. It needed a total renovation.

“It was a lot harder than I thought it would be. The musical theater community has a lot of very strong opinions, and there was a certain amount of controversy and anger about me having the gall to rewrite Oscar Hammerstein,” Hwang says.

“But that is what art is supposed to do, provoke a reaction. You would prefer to have it be a positive reaction, but a negative one is OK, too. That’s part of the job,” he says.

As it happens, the Rodgers and Hammerstein organization, which controls the canon, is famously reluctant to let people update the classics. But it made an exception in Hwang’s case. Although Hammerstein referred to “Flower Drum” as his “lucky hit,” it’s rarely revived. They hoped Hwang’s alchemy would help audiences rediscover it.

“David is an expert on the world of Asian culture and the life of Asian-Americans,” says Ted Chapin, president and executive director of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization. “He has probed various aspects of the whole question of assimilation with dramatic poignancy and skill in his work. What was unique in the vision he and his directing collaborators brought to the project was a sense of leaving the show very specifically in its place and time, but reconceiving the characters.”

Hwang decided to preserve the songs and discard the book. He even found a way to use the original show tunes but take the sting out of their outdated sensibilities. The “Chop Suey” number, which features Asian women as chorus girls wearing takeout Chinese food containers, and the infamously sexist “I Enjoy Being a Girl” ditty are placed in the context of a play within a play, a nightclub act where all the sentiments are playacting. Life is a cabaret, old chum.

This tongue-in-cheek approach to the often touchy subjects of race and gender is meant to help modern audiences hear the music with fresh ears.

“Rodgers & Hammerstein were never afraid of stories having to do with race and cultures,” Chapin notes, “and the problems people have in dealing with both.”

Still, Hwang admits the pressure was intense. After a well-received run in Los Angeles, he headed into the Broadway debut with some trepidation. After the phenomenal success of “M. Butterfly,” Hwang found himself cast as a spokesman for Asian-Americans at large.

“If the show fails, it’s not just an artistic failure,” he notes ruefully. “It’s as if you let down the whole race, you know?”

Certainly not everyone was stirred by the beat of the “Drum.” The New York Times damned the show with faint praise: “You can feel the honorable intentions behind the creative team’s effort to resuscitate a work regarded as terminally out of date. But equally evident is the strain in transforming cute and cozy ethnic types from the Broadway production of 1958 into a set of positive Asian role models that might be introduced into a public school presentation.”

Others have embraced this “Flower Drum Song” for trying to forge a new melody from an old tuner.

“I have great admiration for the bold risks this new adaptation took,” Chapin says. “The fact is that ‘FDS’ wasn’t being done, and this was, and remains, an interesting way to revisit a show that had fallen” out of favor.

For Hwang, the musical was also a way to connect with his heritage as an Asian-American artist.

“We were able to connect to what had come before. The cycle went from C.Y. Lee and the generation that worked on the original to my boomer generation, and then to the kids in the new version,” he says. “It felt like a great coming together of different decades of Asian-American theater people.”

Contact Karen D’Souza at kdsouza@mercurynews.com or (408) 271-3772. Check out her theater reviews, feature stories and blog at www.mercurynews.com/kdsouza.