Flower Drum Song

Shortly after Oklahoma had made Rodgers and Hammerstein the best-known combination since bread and butter, Mr. Hammerstein is said to have taken a large ad in Variety, the theatrical trade paper. It gave a long list of the flops with which he had been connected, and under these the words, "I've done it before and I can do it again."

Financially speaking, of course, Mr. Hammerstein and his friends can't do it again: Flower Drum Song is already sold out solid for its four and a half weeks in Boston, and promises to do correspondingly well in New York. But from the aesthetic stand-point, Oliver Smith's pretty sets, some of Carol Haney's choreography, and a few nice songs and pleasant performances are the only silky spots on a lavishly gilded sow's ear.

The book and lyrics are the worst of it. The setting is San Francisco's Chinatown, but Mr. Hammerstein and his co-librettist Joseph Fields have wasted the opportunities for exoticism and social comment, provided by the conflicts existing there between Chinese and American cultures.

Under the cheesy chinoiserie the plot is the same dreary triangle that has already served so many so badly. There is a fast and loose charmer who tempts the hero, but it is the little snow pea his wise old father had chosen who gets him in the end. All this is unfolded in an atmosphere that varies between Mr. Hammerstein's old Norman Rockwell whole someness and a new, Broadway, meretriciousness of second-rate sick jokes and falsie gags. Mechandizing the cuteness of a whole covey of little children (including one with a hula hoop, who got a big hand) provides the authors with one of several opportunities to be wholesome and meretricious at the same time.

Admirers of Mr. Rodgers will be glad to know that he is writing almost exactly the same sort of music today as he was fifteen years ago. The only difference is that his songs, always easy to remember, are now also easy to forget.

Mr. Rodgers, perhaps, had an un due influence upon casting, since the singing is highly competent while the acting ranges from adequate down. The only exception to the latter stricture is Miyoshi Umeki, the heroine who is exceedingly good at looking demure. One might even go so far as to call her charming. Pat Suzuki as her brassy rival has an absolutely A-number-1 smile, and a pretty good figure too. Her singing will be fun when she learns how much volume she needs to fill the house. Ed Kenney plays the handsome hero with whom half of Chinatown is in love; he sings okay, but he can't act.

But Flower Drum Song's main trouble does not lie with its Oriental performers; like most Yellow Perils, this one is a put-up job by a group of all-too scrutable Caucasians. --JULIUS NOVICK