East of Suez

"If you aren't slant-eyed and flat-chested," said one young unemployed actress last week, "you haven't a prayer of getting a job." Cause of her complaint: Broadway is going heavily Oriental this season. The World of Suzie Wong (see THEATER) is only the first of a Far East catalogue that includes such forthcoming items as Flower Drum Song, Rashomon, Kataki, Cry for Happy and the umpteenth revival of The Shanghai Gesture. Even the small, off-Broadway houses are braced for the Oriental invasion, with three versions of classic Japanese No drama.

Broadway's Far East kick is creating a huge, cumulative casting problem, and the man who is coping with most of it is Agent Tony Rivers, Manhattan's leading Oriental flesh peddler (he inherited his business from his former boss, Kaie Deei, a part-Egyptian, part-Zulu agent, who specialized in Negroes, Orientals and American Indians). Agent Rivers is finding the white man's burden heavy. Biggest problem: Asians tend to act with rigidity and gliding formalism. To fill the part of Sammy Fong, unofficial mayor of Chinatown, Flower Drum's Casting Director Ed Blum finally had to cross the color line and hire Manhattan Comedian Larry Storch. "The part calls for a sharpie," says Blum, "and the Orientals can't play it. Smoothie, yes; sharpie, no." Otherwise, Blum's cast is out of character only to the extent of one Puerto Rican, one Filipino and one Hawaiian.

To make up for such casting lapses, Agent Rivers and the producers he supplies try hard for authenticity in other respects. Before Suzie's costume designer, Dorothy Jeakins, ever laid out a hemline, she imported coolie suits from Hong Kong, even interviewed newsmen who had lived in the Orient and were "more or less familiar with brothels."

Both Suzie and Flower Drum hired the same speech expert, Professor Simon Mitchneck of Columbia, to turn Oriental inflections into speech that is understandable to American audiences. He is currently working with Japan's Miyoshi Umeki and the rest of the cast of Flower Drum, shaving vowels, changing consonants, even breaking Comedian Storch of his New Yorkese. Just about the only time Agent Rivers got off the Oriental beat this season was when Producers Feuer and Martin insisted that they would cast their new musical Whoop-Up only with full-blooded Indians. "I scoured the area," says Rivers. "My God, I had hundreds of Indians down for the auditions. You know what Feuer and Martin ended up with? A Broadway cast. Not an Indian in it. Just Schmohawks."

To judge from current plans, producers will be working the Oriental gimmick to death, bringing new East-of-Suez shows to town far into spring. "Damned if I can explain it," says Producer Irene Selznick, one of the few who has yet to find a place in the new Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. "But it's good for international relations." Says Agent Rivers: "Sometimes it's all the great unwashed. This season it's Orientals. When this phase is over I'll be left on my tail."

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