It’s raining traditional musical revivals in Los Angeles, with three reveals penned by Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe poised to run concurrently this spring.
These mid-century dream groups revolutionized American theater by popularizing the built-in musical, a type which leveraged traditional operetta components like tune and dance as narrative instruments.
Once cutting-edge and now quintessential, productions led by these iconic writing duos, together with guide writers Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, represented a rising curiosity amongst librettists in cohesive tales that supplied topical cultural commentary. “Oklahoma!” (1943) is usually credited with kicking off this “Golden Age” of Broadway, which lasted roughly by the Nineteen Sixties.
That Golden Age arrives in fashionable L.A. by way of “Flower Drum Song,” at East West Players by May 31; “The Sound of Music,” on the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, starting May 5; and “Brigadoon” at Pasadena Playhouse beginning May 13. While every of those reveals engages with its supply materials in a different way, all allow theatergoers to each discover what made them classics and uncover their modern resonance.
“Brigadoon,” Pasadena Playhouse (May 13–June 14)
Betsy Morgan and Max von Essen star in “Brigadoon” at Pasadena Playhouse. The traditional present has been revised by Alexandra Silber for a contemporary viewers.
(Jeff Lorch)
Alexandra Silber spent a lot of her theater profession with traditional musicals, and a number of childhood learning performing in Scotland, so she felt it was her destiny to adapt Lerner and Loewe’s 1947 fantasy romp, “Brigadoon.”
The unique musical tells the story of two American vacationers who occur upon a legendary village within the Scottish Highlands that seems simply as soon as each 100 years. Coming after three unsuccessful early collaborations, “Brigadoon” was the primary main breakthrough hit for Lerner and Loewe, performing because the turning level that established them as premier theater creators. Critics have been notably enchanted by the present’s lush rating and fantastical environment.
Silber loves “Brigadoon” for these causes and extra. The methods wherein the present’s characters expertise grief helped Silber by her personal when she misplaced her father at age 18. But her immersion in Scottish tradition taught her that Lerner and Loewe’s unique guide didn’t characterize Scotland realistically. Instead, she mentioned it leaned into sentimentality and stereotyping. In her revised guide, Silber sought to treatment that, together with “Brigadoon’s” flattened feminine characters, whereas nonetheless honoring the present’s emotional core.
“[‘Brigadoon’ is] this enormous property with so much potential, but the existing book from 1947, like a lot of these books, reflects the temperaments and mores of that era and not necessarily of our 21st century sensibilities,” Silber mentioned.
Maybe it was an intuition born from a want to honor her personal father’s reminiscence, however Silber felt protecting over Lerner’s legacy, and instructed his property as a lot when she pitched her adaptation.
“I said to them, ‘All I want to do is take your father and husband’s hand from 1947 and go, OK, Alan Jay Lerner, let’s go roaming into the 21st century,’” Silber mentioned, referencing a lyric from the “Brigadoon” tune “Heather on the Hill.”
In Silber’s revival, the smart schoolmaster Mr. Lundie is Widow Lundie, and the city flirt Meg Brockie is a pub proprietor pushing center age. Both revised characters mirror the matriarchal historical past of 18th century Scotland, wherein girls held extra highly effective roles than fashionable society associates with previous occasions, the playwright mentioned.
Alexandra Silber stops to chuckle at James Irvine Japanese Garden.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
“They were the keepers of wisdom and culture,” Silber mentioned. “They made huge contributions to society and were invaluable to the [social] fabric.”
Silber’s “Brigadoon” may even characteristic a dwell conventional Scottish people band, known as a cèilidh band, accompanying Meg Brockie’s songs.
While hardly anybody bats an eye fixed at re-imagining Shakespeare, Silber mentioned, some folks really feel in a different way about musicals, maybe as a result of musical theater is typically perceived as an unserious medium. However, “when regarded with seriousness and not with an eye roll, these are great works of art,” she mentioned.
In the case of “Brigadoon,” Lerner and Loewe composed a musical that acknowledged the worldwide scar of World War II, and in its insistence that love transcended loss, gave folks the catharsis they wanted. Just like Rodgers and Hammerstein, they have been delicate to their present second and sought to use artwork to information their friends by it, Silber mentioned.
To her, “Brigadoon” coming to L.A. concurrently the Rodgers and Hammerstein productions “feels like an absolute head-nod of, clearly, there’s something in the zeitgeist where we’re all agreeing and deciding that there is wisdom to be found in these old musicals, there is pleasure, illumination and catharsis to be found there [and] that those things do have value.”
“Having a communal, shared experience with a classic story that still reminds us of ourselves, it gives us the opportunity to realize that since time immemorial, we’ve all asked the same questions,” she mentioned.
“Flower Drum Song,” East West Players (ends May 31)
Krista Marie Yu in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Flower Drum Song,” produced by East West Players and the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center. The present has been reimagined by Tony Award-winner David Henry Hwang.
(Mike Palma)
In his 2026 revival of “Flower Drum Song,” David Henry Hwang will not be solely in dialog with the musical’s unique composers, but in addition with himself.
The Tony Award-winning playwright first tailored Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1958 traditional set in San Francisco’s Chinatown a quarter-century in the past, as “revisicals” — wherein unique songs have been preserved, however books have been rewritten for the trendy period — have been cropping up left and proper.
“At that point, ‘Flower Drum Song’ was a musical that just wasn’t being produced much at all,” Hwang mentioned. “It had been a success in its time within the late ‘50s and throughout a lot of the ‘60s, and then it just stopped being performed for a number of reasons.”
Hwang knew the show had great potential, though. It loomed large in the Asian American imagination as the only Broadway musical prior to 2015 that centered Asians as Americans. Luckily, the Rodgers and Hammerstein estate was receptive, and Hwang’s “Flower Drum Song” opened in 2001 at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum.
Nearly 25 years later, Hwang discovered himself in talks with East West Players’ creative director Lily Tung Crystal about which of his reveals may be part of the corporate’s sixtieth anniversary lineup. They toyed with “M. Butterfly,” the masterpiece that earned Hwang his Tony, however saved gravitating towards “Flower Drum Song.”
Part of the intrigue for Hwang lay in the truth that as he learn his 2001 guide many years later, he felt the identical approach he had when he first consulted Rodgers and Hammerstein’s within the late ‘90s — that many things were “creepy and outdated.”
“It had been a hit in its time in the late ‘50s and throughout a lot of the ‘60s, and then it just stopped being performed for a number of reasons,” David Henry Hwang said of “Flower Drum Song,” which he adapted for a modern audience.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
“It just felt like this would be the perfect confluence,” Hwang said, to revisit “Flower Drum Song” with other Asian American creatives, at the nation’s longest-running Asian American theater. He added that this model imagines the manufacturing “through an Asian American lens, as opposed to any even unconscious choices that I made in 2001 to be consistent with what I perceived to be a Broadway audience back then.”
Hwang may have written a brand new, unique work, however he felt there was one thing distinctly highly effective about bringing again a Golden Age musical that was so radical in its time.
Rodgers and Hammerstein composed “Flower Drum Song” within the late ‘50s, when Chinese Americans were still being aggressively investigated by the FBI as suspected communists.
Yet in that milieu, Hwang said, “Rodgers and Hammerstein chose to write a musical that asserts that Chinese Americans are as American as anyone else … [and] then they worked really hard to cast it with an overwhelmingly Asian American cast, which was much harder to do in those days.”
So despite Rodgers and Hammerstein’s at occasions inauthentic depictions of Asian Americans within the story, “I think they have to get credit for that as a radical act and as a reflection of their political progressivism,” the playwright mentioned.
Hwang mentioned that he believes Golden Age theater is uniquely positioned to ease theatergoers into extra critically analyzing our current second.
“It has the comfort elements of nostalgia. At the same time, it’s looked at through new eyes and a new lens,” he mentioned. “It can be cutting-edge in its content and address the turmoil and the frustrations and the anger that many of us are feeling today.”
“The Sound of Music,” The Hollywood Pantages Theatre (May 5–24); and Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa (June 2-14)
“The play originally was called ‘The Singing Heart,’ and that’s really what it’s about… the music is never something extra,” Tim Crouse mentioned about “The Sound of Music.”
(Jeremy Daniel)
Jack O’Brien, who directed “The Sound of Music” revival greater than a decade in the past, as soon as raved a couple of Russian manufacturing of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical in a letter to a producer, which made its approach to Tim Crouse — son of guide author Russel Crouse.
“I read, like, four sentences in his description, and it was obvious that he had a real affinity for the show,” Crouse mentioned, including that he knew O’Brien — who beforehand led the Old Globe in San Diego — was the person for the job.
The 1965 movie adaptation of “The Sound of Music” broke field workplace data, and went on to substitute “Gone With the Wind” because the highest-grossing movie of all time, turning Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical right into a worldwide phenomenon.
“But [the film’s success has] also been a hindrance,” Crouse mentioned, “because people want to sneak the movie into the show … and the show is a different animal.”
While the movie adaptation’s political themes are toned down, the unique musical targeted on the darkish environment of the Nazi annexation of Austria and the Von Trapp household’s wrestle for freedom.
Julie Andrews in a scene from the 1965 movie, “The Sound of Music.”
(Twentieth Century-Fox)
O’Brien, in his 2015 production of “The Sound of Music” on the Ahmanson, which has been subtly revised for the Pantages, “approached the script as if it were Shakespeare or Shaw, and he looked at every line to see what it was really about,” Crouse mentioned.
For Crouse, the musical is about many issues: music itself, in fact, but in addition vocation, integrity and religion: “There was a lot for them to get their teeth into in terms of a story.”
That actually appealed to Hammerstein, he mentioned, whose librettos tended to have political facets to them. Crouse’s father and his accomplice had an analogous behavior of writing tales with political undertones, Crouse mentioned, asking audiences, “Who are you when the whistle blows?”
At the time “The Sound of Music” first arrived, that query might need been extra pointed, with a world conflict not far within the rearview. That’s what made it so resonant on the time, Crouse mentioned.
Yet, he mentioned, watching the musical as we speak, he sees its central questions are simply as related as they have been when his father’s present first premiered.
“What are you going to do with your life? How are you going to find out? Why are you here?” he mentioned. “Those are timeless issues, and obviously they have a certain pertinence today in the United States of America.”
