Flower Drum Song was the eighth musical by the team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. It was based on the 1957 novel, The Flower Drum Song, by Chinese-American author C. Y. Lee. The piece opened in 1958 on Broadway and was afterwards presented in the West End and on tour. It was subsequently made into a 1961 musical film.

After their extraordinary early successes, beginning with Oklahoma! in 1943, Rodgers and Hammerstein had written two musicals in the 1950s that did not do well and sought a new hit to revive their fortunes. Lee's novel focuses on a father, Wang Chi-yang, a wealthy refugee from China, who clings to traditional values in San Francisco's Chinatown. Rodgers and Hammerstein shifted the focus of the musical to his son, Wang Ta, who is torn between his Chinese roots and assimilation into American culture. The team hired Gene Kelly to make his debut as a stage director with the musical and scoured the country for a suitable Asian – or at least, plausibly Asian-looking – cast. The musical, much more light-hearted than Lee's novel, was profitable on Broadway and was followed by a national tour.

After the release of the 1961 film version, the musical was rarely produced, as it presented casting issues and fears that Asian-Americans would take offense at how they are portrayed. When it was put on the stage, lines and songs that might be offensive were often cut. The piece did not return to Broadway until 2002, when a version with a plot by playwright David Henry Hwang (but retaining most of the original songs) was presented after a successful Los Angeles run. Hwang's story retains the Chinatown setting and the inter-generational and immigrant themes, and emphasizes the romantic relationships. It received mostly poor reviews in New York and closed after six months but had a short tour and has since been produced regionally.

Background
Novel
C.Y. Lee fled war-torn China in the 1940s and came to the United States, where he attended Yale University's playwriting program, graduating in 1947 with an M.F.A. degree. By the 1950s, he was barely making a living writing short stories and working as a Chinese teacher, translator and journalist for San Francisco Chinatown newspapers.[1] He had hoped to break into playwriting, but instead wrote a novel about Chinatown, The Flower Drum Song (originally titled Grant Avenue). Lee initially had no success selling his novel, but his agent submitted it to the publishing house of Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. The firm sent the manuscript to an elderly reader for evaluation. The reader was found dead in bed, the manuscript beside him with the words "Read this" scrawled on it. The publishing house did so, and bought Lee's novel, which became a bestseller in 1957.

Lee's novel centers on Wang Chi-yang, a 63-year-old man who fled China to avoid the communists. The wealthy refugee lives in a house in Chinatown with his two sons. His sister-in-law, Madam Tang, who takes citizenship classes, is a regular visitor and urges Wang to adopt Western ways. While his sons and sister-in-law are integrating into American culture, Wang stubbornly resists assimilation and speaks only two words of English, "Yes" and "No". Wang also has a severe cough, which he does not wish to have cured, feeling that it gives him authority in his household. Wang's elder son, Wang Ta, woos Linda Tung, but on learning that she has many men in her life, drops her; he later learns she is a nightclub dancer. Linda's friend, seamstress Helen Chao, who has been unable to find a man despite the shortage of eligible women in Chinatown, gets Ta drunk and seduces him. On awakening in her bed, he agrees to an affair, but eventually abandons her, and she commits suicide.

Impatient at Ta's inability to find a wife, Wang arranges for a picture bride for his son. However, before the picture bride arrives, Ta meets a young woman, May Li, who with her father has recently come to San Francisco. The two support themselves by singing depressing flower drum songs on the street. Ta invites the two into the Wang household, with his father's approval, and he and May Li fall in love. He vows to marry her after she is falsely accused by the household servants of stealing a clock, though his father forbids it. Wang struggles to understand the conflicts that have torn his household apart; his hostility toward assimilation is isolating him from his family. In the end, taking his son's advice, Wang decides not to go to the herbalist to seek a remedy for his cough, but walks to a Chinese-run Western clinic, symbolizing that he is beginning to accept American culture.

Original Broadway production
After the Boston tryouts, Flower Drum Song opened on Broadway at the St. James Theatre on December 1, 1958. Sets were designed by Oliver Smith, costumes by Irene Sharaff and lighting by Peggy Clark.

C.Y. Lee sat in the audience on the first night; he later stated that he had been nervous and was "bowled over" by the positive audience reaction. The show attracted considerable advance sales; even when these were exhausted, sales remained strong and sellouts were the norm. Cast album sales were similar to previous Rodgers and Hammerstein hits. The show received six Tony Award nominations, but won only one Tony (Best Conductor and Musical Director, for Salvatore Dell'Isola). It was overshadowed that year by Redhead, which though it received only slightly better reviews than Flower Drum Song, and had a considerably shorter run, dominated the Tony Awards in the musical categories. Flower Drum Song ran for 600 performances, a longer run than any other musical from the 1958–1959 season – it lasted longer than any of the shows with which it had competed for Asian performers.

Midway through the run, Larry Blyden left the show and was replaced in the role of Sammy Fong by Jack Soo, with Larry Leung assuming the role of Frankie Wing. The production returned $125,000 profit to its backers on an investment of $360,000. Attendance began to decline in December 1959, though it continued to draw at above the 70% of capacity level which a Broadway play then needed to meet expenses. With the summer approaching, generally a bad time for attendance, it was decided to close the show, and the last Broadway performance was given on May 7, 1960.

In his autobiography, Rodgers wrote of the effect the success of Flower Drum Song had on his state of mind: The entire experience of working on Flower Drum Song was rewarding in many ways, not the least of which was that it convinced me that I had overcome all traces of my depression. My only thought was to keep on doing what I was doing, and I saw nothing in the future that could stop me.

Music and recordings
Rodgers and Hammerstein sought to give the new work an Eastern flavor, without using existing oriental music. According to Ben Brantley in his review of the 2002 Broadway revival, the use by Rodgers "of repetitive Eastern musical structures gives the numbers a sing-song catchiness that, for better or worse, exerts a sticky hold on the memory." The most oriental-sounding song in the work is "A Hundred Million Miracles", which provides the eight-note drumbeat which is the musical signature of the work from overture to curtain. Hammerstein wrote Mei Li's first act song, "I Am Going to Like It Here", in a Malaysian poetic form called pantoum in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the next. One critic thought that the 2001 version's orchestrations "boast more Asian accents and a jazzier edge than the original", but another felt that they "pale in comparison" to Bennett's typically lilting sound.

As with many of Rodgers and Hammerstein's musicals, the work features a ballet at the start of the second act, choreographed in the original production by Carol Haney. The ballet dramatizes the confused romantic longings of Wang Ta towards the women in his life, and ends as he awakens in Helen Chao's bed. Thomas Hischak, in his The Rodgers and Hammerstein Encyclopedia, notes that the ballets in Oklahoma! and Carousel (choreographed by Agnes de Mille) broke new ground in illustrating facets of the characters beyond what is learned in songs and dialogue, but describes the ballet in Flower Drum Song as "pleasant but not memorable". Although Hischak describes Rodgers as "the greatest waltz composer America has ever seen", Flower Drum Song was the first Rodgers and Hammerstein musical not to feature one.