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Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Chopsticks” Musicals Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Chopsticks” Musicals / 143 9 Overture Richard Rodgers writes, in Musical Stages (1975): “When I was about six, a girl named Constance Hyman, the daughter of a college friend of my father’s, taught me to play ‘Chopsticks’ with my left hand so that it would fit the melody of any song I was trying to reproduce with my right hand” (p. 9). Throughout the brilliant joint careers of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Rodgers the composer has been true to his childhood apprenticeship, with Oriental flavor liberally sprinkling his corpus. In terms of the most memorable Rodgers and Hammerstein legacy, The Sound of Music (1965) and The King and I (1956) share the limelight,1 musicals set, respectively, in Austria and in Siam, and both drawing from stereotypically Anglo-European versus Oriental tropes. Their corpus, which manifests predominantly Western consciousness , features one distinct Oriental period that includes The King and I, South Pacific (1958), and Flower Drum Song (1961). This “left-handed,” Oriental element can hardly be viewed as an awkward appendix to their stellar achievement. Indeed, in the comical maladroitness of their Orientalist songs lies the key to the overall success of Rodgers and Hammerstein. To borrow from the metaphor of the six-year-old’s piano lesson, the weaving of the lefthanded “Chopsticks” into the “real” music played by the right hand is the extra stuff which enlivens otherwise mediocre compositions, just as carbonated fizz transforms ordinary sugar water into a soft drink. The ostensibly negligible Oriental ambience helps catapult each Chopsticks musical, and the careers of Rodgers and Hammerstein as well, into prominence. The forte of Rodgers and Hammerstein is, in fact, Broadway shows rather thanmovies,asRodgersexplains:“Publishingsongs,producingplaysandwriting songs for moving pictures were profitable and challenging enterprises, but Oscar and I never thought of ourselves as anything but writers for the Broadway musical theatre” (Musical Stages 1975, p. 237). Yet their reputation today 144 / Intercut on Body Oriental is primarily founded on films, since live Broadway shows, thrilling as they are, vanish as soon as they are performed. My analysis, therefore, concentrates on the films. The dates given for the three Oriental musicals refer to the films, not the Broadway productions, all of which opened on stage years before their respective cinematic adaptations. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s chopsticks musicals exist in a complex web of cultural products. Each is adapted from short stories or novels, first for Broadway and subsequently for motion pictures. Anna Leonowens’s two-volume autobiography, The English Governess in the Siamese Court (1870) and The Romance of the Harem (1872), record her experiences as a teacher at the Siamese court in the 1860s. Margaret Landon, who also worked in Siam as a teacher, turns the Leonowens books into Anna and the King of Siam (1944), a narrative “seventy-five per cent fact, and twenty-five per cent fiction based on fact” (Leonowens’s self-description quoted in Elsie Weil’s “Editor’s Note” to the Landon book, p. ix). A black-and-white drama, Anna and the King of Siam, starring Rex Harrison and Irene Dunne, was released in 1946. The genius of Rodgers and Hammerstein reconstructs this film as the 1956 musical with Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr. A 1999 version of the story, Anna and the King, features Chow Yun-fat and Jodie Foster as the protagonists. South Pacific, on the other hand, is based on several stories in James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific (1947), a collection that won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. The musical combines Liat, Bloody Mary, and Joe Cable from “Fo’ Dolla” with Emile de Becque and Nellie Forbush from “Our Heroine” (Rodgers, Musical Stages 1975, pp. 258–259), merging, in effect, Oriental and Anglo-European narratives. The last of the three, Flower Drum Song, is adapted from C. Y. Lee’s novel of the same title published in 1957. The film’s genesis from a Chinese expatriate writer and its almost exclusively Asian and Asian American cast perpetuate the myth of model minority and their continued ghettoization, both themes advanced by the musical. Act I: English Teacher While certain “progressive” Hollywood renditions of the encounter between East and West cast—as Flower Drum Song does—mostly Asian and pseudoAsian characters, there is invariably the stock character of—for lack of a better term—the English teacher. Open-minded liberalism has its limits after all, evident in the proliferation of Western...

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