9 Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Chopsticks” Musicals

Abstract

Overture Richard Rodgers writes in Musical Stages: An Autobiography (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 so that it would fit the melody of any song I was trying to reproduce with my right hand (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) would share the limelight,1 musicals set, respectively, in Austria and in Siam, drawing from stereotypically Anglo-European versus Oriental tropes. In terms of their corpus, one which manifests predominantly Western consciousness, it features a distinct Oriental period which 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 Chopsticks motif into the real music from the right is the extra stuff that enlivens otherwise mediocre compositions, like carbonated fizz transforming ordinary sugar water to a soft drink. The ostensibly negligible Oriental ambience helps catapult each Chopsticks musical as well as the careers of Rodgers and Hammerstein into prominence. The forte of Rodgers and Hammerstein is, in fact, Broadway shows rather than movies, as Rodgers explains: Publishing songs, producing plays and writing 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 237). Yet their reputation today is primarily founded on films, since live Broadway shows, as thrilling as they are, vanish as soon as they are performed. Therefore, my analysis concentrates on films. The dates for the three Oriental musicals refer to the films based on Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway shows, 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 of the three is adapted from short stories or novels, first for Broadway and subsequently for motion pictures. Anna Leonowens's two-volume autobiographies, 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 Leonowens's 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, ix). The black-and-white Anna and the King of Siam starring Rex Harrison and Irene Dunne is released in 1946. The genius of Rodgers and Hammerstein reconstructs Harrison's film as the 1956 musical with Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr. In 1999, 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 A. Michener's Tales of the South Pacific (1947), a collection that won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Specifically, it combines Liat, Bloody Mary, and Joe Cable from Fo' Dolla with Emile de Becque and Nellie Forbush from Our Heroine (Musical Stages 258-59), merging, in effect, Oriental and Anglo-European narratives. 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. …