Museum of Chinese in America

David Lober was part of the dance ensemble in Rodger and Hammerstein’s 1958 musical “Flower Drum Song.” He has also performed in numerous musicals during the 1940s through 1960s such as “Wonderful Town,” “My Fair Lady,” “Here’s Love,” and “Fiddler on the Roof.” In this interview, David shares various aspects of his experience on “Flower Drum Song,” including auditioning, working with choreographer Carole Haney and director Gene Kelly, serving as dance captain, being let go during the national tour, appealing his firing through an Actors’ Equity arbitration, and meeting his wife, who was also a dancer on the show. He also offers his thoughts on critiques that the show modeled offensive Asian stereotypes, David Henry Hwang’s modern rewriting of the show and whether it was sacrilegious to rewrite musicals from the golden era, and how he thinks musical theater has changed since the 1940s and 1950s. This interview is one of a series of 18 interviews that author David Lewis Hammarstrom conducted in 2003 as part of research for his book, Flower Drum Songs: The Story of Two Musicals (2006).