Drew Cohen: Welcome. This is Drew Cohen. I'm the president of Music Theatre International. We're here in New York City at the offices of MTI. We're very pleased to have a panel here for our discussion today, which will be moderated by Jack Tchen, who is a professor at NYU. We have a number of the artists who have been involved in the creation of Thoroughly Modern Millie, including the authors: lyricist and co-book writer, Dick Scanlan and composer Jeanine Tesori. We also have two of the actors who originated roles in Thoroughly Modern Millie, Ken Leung and Francis Jue, who originated the roles of Ching Ho and Bun Foo, respectively. Welcome everyone.

Everyone: Thank you.

Drew Cohen: Jack ...

Jack Tchen: Let's get started. I thought it would be useful ... I'm a historian so I think it's useful to maybe to put a little bit of this in context. I'd love to hear from Dick and Jeanine how they came up with the Broadway version of this after a film had already been done. Also, what's clear to me is that, you were also not accepting some of the incredible racist stereotypes of the film itself, and you wanted to tweak them. It'd be good to hear what was going through your heads as you were coming up with the music, but also the lyrics, and the lines themselves, and the characterizations, as well.

Dick Scanlan: Thoroughly Modern Millie was an idea that I had when I first began writing in 
the late 1980s. At the time that I had the idea, I wasn't aware that several people before me had actually conceived Thoroughly Modern Millie as a Broadway musical and had tried to make that happen. The man who had written the movie, who became my co-book writer eventually, Richard Morris, who's no longer living, was a rather cantankerous, rather wonderful, opinionated fellow and he had not responded to the people who'd come before me. It was a little like Mary Poppins, they had all blown away and when I eventually flew into his life in 1993 to present my idea that I write it, he took to me and suggested that we co-write it together.

I knew a great deal about the history of the movie. I understood how it had come about, which was basically that there was a film producer who wanted to do The Boyfriend as a movie and who had never seen the show The Boyfriend, and mentioned that to Richard, but those rights were taken. Richard said, "Well, you know, The Boyfriend is just a spoof of twenties musicals. If what you want to do is a story set in the twenties, we could write anything, right." He ... they came up with this story. Richard, as an aesthetic, was sort of obsessed with chinoiserie and was obsessed also with the incredible popularity of chinoiserie during the 1920s, as is often common in a decade where there's tremendous phobia. Simultaneous with that is an obsession with the aesthetics of the culture about which people are phobic.

Richard, in a very, very superficial and kind of, you know, throwing-things-against-the-wall way came up with those choices. There was no political idea behind it, because of course in the mid sixties, people's consciuonessses were very different. When I decided to approach it to turn it to a stage vehicle, I instantly recognized that the, amongst many of the problems in the show, one of them was a huge amount of racism around the idea of white slavery, which white slavery is what we now call, human trafficking. White slavery in fact, is and was a real thing but it was also often used as a smoke screen for fear of sex and certainly a smoke screen for xenophobia and a lot of other things. Racism around that, but specifically around the characters of Mrs. Meers, who in the movie is portrayed by the brilliant comedienne, Bea Lillie as an indeterminate ... you're not exactly sure what she's doing. She actually had Alzheimer's during the filming of the movie and actually didn't know, but never learned anyone's name.

The way that they filmed this, Julie Andrews would say Bea's line, squeeze Bea's hand, and then Bea would repeat it, and they would just cut out ... She honestly didn't know the plot of the play. The other aspect was the role played by Pat ... Jack Soo and Pat Morita, who were her henchmen and called "Oriental #1" and "Oriental #2". I really struggled with how to attack it, because the obvious idea was to get rid of it. Literally to make them mafia, right? An acceptable stereotype. Make them Louie and Victorio [crosstalk]

Jeanine Tesori: ... haven't seen enough of that.

Dick Scanlan: Exactly. Or to make them the henchmen, just the guys who are there and one's fat and one's skinny, one smokes a cigar, whatever. I found it very... I was confused, because I kept saying to myself, "It seems so odd to right this wrong that was done specifically to Asians and Asian Americans, but really, racism is a wrong done to all of us because it's just bad news for humankind to right that by eliminating roles for Asian American actors." It just seemed peculiar to me. I was like, "There must be a way to solve this so that I can sort of subvert or turn the racist, the egregious racism movie on its head and preserve these employment opportunities."

It was a bifurcated solution. The first thing I conceived was a backstory, which first of all individuated the characters; two characters. They are brothers, they're recent immigrants, they are here because this awful woman - who is not Asian - keeps promising them that she will bring their mother over once they've done a certain amount of bidding for her, but they have fundamentally different moralities. One brother is a pragmatist - like the character of Millie actually - who believes that the end justifies the means, period. The other, is a complete poet/dreamer who has an inherent sense of ethics and obviously wants his mother to come, but wonders what toll it's taking on his soul and their soul in order to do it. I thought okay ... I understood that, but there was still something wrong.

At this point I approached director Michael Mayer. Michael, who was very excited about the idea of the play, kept saying, "I can't sign on to do this until I understand how to attack the Asian characters. I can't ..." Mike was a very politically oriented artist and he's like, "I just simply can't do it." After a few months of discussion about it, we screened the movie as a benefit for Broadway Cares, a new print, and the next morning Michael called me and said, "I know what to do. I know exactly what to do. I don't know how you're going to feel about it and if you don't like it, I'm not the guy for you, because it's a whole aesthetic for me."

He told me the idea and I immediately loved it, which was that the two characters would speak in Chinese. They're recent immigrants, how would they possibly be able to speak English? At that moment, they became liberated to speak as much or as little as we needed them to, to articulate whatever they were thinking or feeling. I immediately said, "In order to do that, they need to become much bigger characters. If we're going to make such a bold theatrical choice, they have to be an intricate part of the narrative in a way that they aren't in the movie at all." That's how the idea came about.

The second aspect, Mrs. Meers, my memory is, and I don't mean to monopolize this so, I'm trying to make it quick, forgive me, my memory is that we were a little bit more stumped about that. The idea that we came up with, which is effectively that Mrs. Meers is a failed actress, who is using her act, what she perceives to be her acting abilities, to create an alternate persona so to hide her criminal activities.

That really came about when Harriet Harris came aboard as our Mrs. Meers. Harriet came aboard for a reading in 1998 and then really joined the company in an official way at the end of our La Jolla production. Harriet felt very strongly and Harriet, being an actress, wasn't articulating it from a political perspective, she was articulating from a creative one, that the way to do this was to walk headlong into the stereotype. That rather than evoke it a little bit here and evoke it a little bit there, go for it and have it be as offensive and extreme a version as the stereotype as can be imagined. She didn't really articulate a reason, it was an impulse.

Michael and I and Jeanine at this point, because Jeanine was very much a part of it, what excited us about this was the opportunity to present the most extreme version of a stereotype on stage next to Asian American actors who were portraying their roles as completely human. Thereby, we felt, completely in-authenticating, disempowering, busting, and delegitimizing the stereotype and revealing it to be a creation out of other people's phobias and desires and all kinds of things that creates this monster that actually looks nothing like what an Asian or an Asian American actually behaves like. We thought it was a theatrical way to bust a stereotype without being didactic.

To me, the Broadway production and the tour, and the London production, I felt did that very successfully. One of the ways that I always thought that was very clear that was happening, there's a moment they show where Ching Ho is trying to communicate to Miss Dorothy, and remember he doesn't speak English, he's trying to talk about Mrs. Meers but she can't understand what he's saying. He uses Mrs. Meers' line, "Sad to be all alone in the world," but the brilliant choice that Ken made, and this was an actor choice, was Ching Ho imitates Mrs. Meers who is imitating what she perceives to be Asian.

The audience would freak out. They would always laugh and sometimes clap because they knew in that moment that what they were watching was this hall of mirrors at the end of which they had clarity about something that they didn't come to this show expecting to have clarity about. That was really ... That was the intention behind the choices we made, is my memory.

Jeanine Tesori: Dick I can't ... That was like a filibuster. That was fantastic. It's also, I think, very accurate to how I remember it because you know when we were creating those characters they became important, really important people who had a conflict, who had something in their way. They started ... These two men started the reprise, they finished the opening number that Millie sets forth. That was a really important thing sung in a language that we also collaborated with both of you on. The movie is filled with those terrible parallel fourths, tack, ack, ack, gunk, gunk, gunk, gunk. I thought, "Oh my god, really?" That's what we had witnessed and then, what we decided to do was to treat everyone ... to make the villain ... I think the villain is quite clear in that there's one.

I recall all of these conversations, hours and hours, the intentionality of it, what are we doing and how are we doing it? What can be the pitfalls of it? What are we subverting? Following from your lead to Michael's and then going along with that and then, including both of you in that.

Jack Tchen: Jeanine, as someone who is very literate on musical history, it would be useful for you to kind of talk a little bit about the dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Right? Tell us a little bit about what that means for you and how it was a problem for you.

Jeanine Tesori: It's like a ... For me, when you are not doing due diligence on a show, it's that you're the ... The playing field isn't level. Anything that is a leitmotif, that's a shortcut to where it actually obliterates the humanity of the character; it's repellent. I don't even know where ... There's a pentatonic scale in those communities and I was, when I was in China on a cultural exchange, there was nothing like a section of Erhus to really ... whew! The language itself is tonal and the idea of A 440 is non-existent, that's the beauty of it. It is not ... You cannot reduce the culture to a bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. It offends.

Just like in Millie or ... What was available to us was the world of music in the 1920s, which is a spectacular world, and that should be available to everyone. As with many things, it's rooted in something identifiable in terms of the pentatonic scale, but it is not that. We went on an investigation for hours and hours, for every character to just say, "What is this world? What is this airtight world? Who are they? How should they sing? Is it Cantonese? Is it Mandarin?" That debate, I don't ... You guys remember, we were talking about why it would be one versus the other. I don't know if you want to join in because I think ...

Dick Scanlan: I don't know if you remember originally when the very first reading we did, because the first reading we did where the language was Chinese, it was Mandarin, and it was you and Alec Mapa, it was Ken Leung and Alec Mapa, because you were unavailable.

Francis Jue: Actually, I said no. 

Dick Scanlan: You were saying no because of the movie.

Francis Jue: Totally.

Dick Scanlan: That's right. Ken, you came to me after that reading and said, "Cantonese is a much more fun language to speak as an actor...

Jeanine Tesori: It's harder.


Dick Scanlan: ... and to listen to and it's more appropriate for immigrants. It's got more...

Francis Jue: It is more appropriate.

Ken Leung: Usually when people say, some people say, "Chinese people talk so angrily." I'm like, "Oh, you're listening to Cantonese." Cantonese has more tones; has like seven tones versus Mandarin, which only has five, four or five. It's more ... What do you call it? It reaches more peaks and lower ... reaches lower lows. It's expressive, it's more emotional, which is why it seems angry a lot of the times because it's loud and people talk with their hands. It's like the Italian of Chinese people.

Francis Jue: It's the Brooklyn of Chinese people. [crosstalk]

Jeanine Tesori: That comes with the cuisine, I'm sure.

Ken Leung: That's why I chose that. It's a relatively short scene between the brothers and I thought that that would be better than ... Mandarin is more fitting for singing. It's inherently lyrical and it's pretty. You could be cursing somebody out and it sounds beautiful. It wasn't a disconnect for me because my parents, who speak Cantonese, have spoken Cantonese, they know Mandarin songs and they sing ... There was no disconnect for me, so that's where I was going with that.

Dick Scanlan: That was the conversation ...

Jeanine Tesori: I remember it exactly.

Dick Scanlan: ... we had where it went from being all Mandarin to speaking Cantonese and singing in Mandarin. That's exactly sort of the dialogue ...

Ken Leung: Cantonese is kind of funnier. It's got so much slang and phrases.

Jeanine Tesori: I think that was the ... Well we could get to it, but I think it's a slippery slope because I think some people thinking ... You want people to be laughing at the language. We were saying, "We want people to be laughing at the actors who are speaking this wonderful language." I could see that it's a very slippery slope if you're not...

Ken Leung: Yeah, I can see that. I can't ... It's like ... I think we had ... We start off with an argument. Right?

Jeanine Tesori: You guys remember it?

Francis Jue: Yeah. I don't like that woman ...

Ken Leung: Right, I don't ... You're like, "Behave yourself because we need her."

Francis Jue: She's got a head for business.

Ken Leung: Right. I just hear that in Cantonese because it's so, it's so cut-to-the-chase funny, whereas in Mandarin it would be, it would be like ...

Francis Jue: More of an intellectual exercise, yeah.

Ken Leung: ... poetic. It wouldn't be the heart of what that scene was trying to say in very short ...

Jack Tchen: Mandarin is a court language, whereas local dialects of Shanghainese, or whatever local dialect there may be would be more of that kind of sharper, more down-to-earth language.

Francis Jue: More like family.

Jack Tchen: I can see playing with that for that reason. It does make sense. If I could ask, Francis, why did you say no initially?

Francis Jue: I think that the movie is racist and I couldn't imagine how they could fix that. It wasn't until I saw a new draft of the show, the second time that Dick very loyally came back to me and asked me to do a reading of the show, that I understood ... There's a part of me that really understands why there'd be controversy around the portrayal of the Chinese characters in Millie. In particular, the portrayal of Mrs. Meers in the show because I had those same concerns. Even though, I was really, really poor at the time, I refused to do it. Even for a hundred bucks, I was like, "I'm not going to put myself [crosstalk]"

Dick Scanlan: I paid a hundred and ten.

Francis Jue: ... "through that." We always got a little extra because we had to learn the Chinese. The irony for me is that, what Dick and Jeanine have achieved is actually a subversion of the racist stereotypes in the movie and actually provides the most progressive, most subversive part of the show in the Chinese subplot of the show.

I will admit that while working on the show, I begged for more, a little more dialogue, a little more time on stage, a little more opportunity to judge Mrs. Meers because I wanted, anticipating controversy with the future rights of the show, I wanted it to be crystal clear to anyone reading it on the page that the intent of the authors and the intent of our original production was to subvert those expectations ... That we were going to come on as people speaking Chinese, as laborers, as recent immigrants and everyone in the audience was going to expect certain things from us because it was a musical, because it's mainstream American media, and we were going to subvert that. I just wanted a little more.

I think that it's ... I think that all we needed was there and that our productions were successful. I can understand how people reading it on the page might go, "How do we do this?" I get asked on Facebook all the time by people doing the show, "How do we do this?" I get approached by strangers all the time asking me, "Our school is doing this, what do we do?" All I can do is describe what we did. Harriet Harris was brilliant as Mrs. Meers and she got a Tony for it for her bravery, partly because she did go whole hog for this stereotype. She dared people to enjoy her downfall. Her accent was nothing ... She was not trying to do a Chinese accent. Her accent was closer to a Texan accent than to a Chinese accent.

Jeanine Tesori: By way of the North Pole.

Francis Jue: Yeah. [crosstalk] It was so bizarre. She afforded Ken and me so many opportunities to judge her, to ... even to caricature her. I don't know if it's in the stage directions or not, but Harriet and I came up in this chase scene towards the end of the show, this opportunity for me to actually caricature her as a mirror of what she was doing when she was trying to communicate with me, communicate with me. She allowed me to make fun of her to her face. It's this brilliant moment of her Asian stereotype and a Chinese actor's character's imitation of an Asian stereotype that I think encapsulates how truly subversive and fantastic this show is at busting these stereotypes.

Jack Tchen: I think everybody's probably heard of blackface, but very few people, fewer people have heard of yellowface. It'd be useful to talk about that a little bit to give folks a context, a theatrical context for how that has worked because in fact, I think the history and the practices of yellowface, history of Chinese exclusion for example, and for that matter since this is supposed to take place in the 1920s, 1922, also the history of eugenics, which is very much of this moment as well in which Italians and Jews are being basically told they're inferior Europeans and excluded from this country after 1924. Right? There's a context to this moment that quite frankly, most Americans don't know about. It'd be useful to talk about that a little bit. So, yellowface ...

Francis Jue: I think many people know yellowface if we refer to shows like, The King and I, Flower Drum Song, where many of those roles were originated by non-Asians. What most people don't know is this long tradition of minstrelsy that included blackface, but also included many Asian stereotypes. Some people were very successful illusionists, magicians, other people with acts that where they imitated Asian people. The point was always that they were exotic, mysterious, that they were nefarious, that there was something ... White slavers, and the point was to judge them and to defeat them.

Jeanine Tesori: Wasn't there the ... I think the thing that we really were ... I remember discussing a lot with the idea of Asian men not being men;  no agency. That there was something ... And to make them ... how do we turn that?  I think that's what had to be addressed. And you end up with the woman who desires you. You end up ... The two people who end up ...

Francis Jue: I end up with a guy.


Jeanine Tesori: Right, you end up with a guy, and heroically.

Francis Jue: ... the job and foiling the plot.

Jeanine Tesori: Right, but I could see if it's not specifically lined up where if you're ... It's a sophisticated subversion because there must be a context. I did see in one of the schools, they were saying, "The contents of this show, we do not agree with. They are offensive." I thought, "That's tricky" because we are not putting something on, but I could see that at that kind of thing inside musical comedy, it's unexpected and perhaps has to be clarified in that way. That was not the intent. What we tried -I think our best - to have the knowledge of was what the thing is that we wanted to, starting with Dick, to Michael, to me, to reveal. Reveal the thing, dramatize the thing, but on face value. As you said, I can see where you would need to ... I was very taken that there was a program note saying, "The material inside this show is not something that the school stands by."

Dick Scanlan: It's also the ... There's a ... The creative process is elusive. In hindsight, we can sort of formalize it, step-by-step, but in the moment it happens on so many different levels all at once. Specifically, the choice to have Ken's character, Ching Ho, end up with Miss Dorothy, it did not arise from a kind of intellectual conversation of, "We would like to fight the yellowface stereotype of emasculated Asian men." Honestly, it emerged from the profundity and authenticity of Ching Ho's love for Miss Dorothy as dramatized by Ken, and how perfectly suited those two characters are for each other. They have to be together, they must, they absolutely must. It just ... It was so clear to us, it was like, "Well of course, they're soul mates."

Jeanine Tesori: As a side note, another MTI show, Violet, is exactly ... in the short story. The soldier who was white, they end up together. As we're rehearsing, I call the author and I said, "In our version, she has to go to the African American soldier. It can't go any other way and I understand if you pull the rights, but it has to do that." She said, "If that's how it's going, that's where you must go."

Dick Scanlan: You follow the road.

Jeanine Tesori: You follow the road that the character leads you on.

Dick Scanlan: By try... I think... I mean, honestly, I think sort of inspired by the truth of what you were bringing to it, we re-conceived the plot of the play, right, which in effect then has ... The by-product it's addressing a yellowface stereotype. That wasn't ... We got there through the backdoor. You know?

Jeanine Tesori: I do hear that the yellowface is very painful and I have said it's been very enlightening for me because I don't think I understood what we were playing with as deeply as I do now. That's the humility of, to me, round-tabling...

Ken Leung: You know the thing is offensive about it along the lines of what you're saying like, take Mickey Rourke in Breakfast ... Breakfast at Tiffany's, right ...

Jack Tchen: Mickey Rooney.


Ken Leung: [crosstalk] Mickey Rooney. I just saw Mickey Rourke in a movie this afternoon.

Jack Tchen: There's another movie of Mickey Rourke that is also problematic, but that's another discussion.

Francis Jue: Oh really?

Ken Leung: The Rainmaker was on this afternoon. What was I going to say? If you have a white actor in yellowface and he's portraying a human being, I don't think it would be so offensive. It's not the appearance that we take offense with, it's when you put on ...

Jack Tchen: There's, The Good Earth, for example, the movie version of, The Good Earth, which has lots of yellowface in it. They're meant to be noble characters ...

Ken Leung: They're meant to be human beings. Right. It's that, it's how they're portrayed ... It's where ... If I were to put on a mask of ... a Jack Tchen mask and behaved like a fool, that would be offensive to you. If I ... If there was reason for me to put on a Jack Tchen mask and be a human being, you would not ... You know what I'm saying?

Francis Jue: Yul Brenner, Juanita Hall, they've turned in beautiful, complex performances; human portrayals. The Asian American acting community has real problems, too, with anyone playing an Asian role with an accent, speaking not in English, playing somebody of lower class. From my point of view, a coolie is a person, too. They were coolies ... There were coolies, but they were people. Speaking ... Tagging onto what Ken is saying, as long as you're playing ... have the opportunity to play somebody who is an actual human being, I don't see the problem with it. People with accents are people, too.

Ken Leung: It's as if you're watching and you can't get past the appearance, then that echoes your own stuff, I think. Right?

Francis Jue: Right. Ken and I would have these conversations while doing the show a lot because friends of ours would come to see the show and they'd say, "I think you guys are hilarious. I only had problems because I wasn't sure whether the audience was laughing at the same thing I was laughing at." This bugged me a lot. I would ask Ken, "How can we make sure that the audience is laughing at what we want them to laugh at?" I learned this from Ken: we can't control that. All we can do is intend what we intend. For anybody looking at this show perspectively and reading it on the page and has problems with it, I only have to say ... My response is that, "You're looking at it and projecting onto it what you expect to see. What is actually on the page is exactly the opposite of racial ... of stereotypes in the characters of Ching Ho and Bun Foo."

Jack Tchen: Part of what's really amazing and perhaps this is on purpose, or perhaps this is just kind of in the tradition of doing the music and the characters, is that it's full of mix-ups. That's a deep tradition, certainly in New York musical tradition, musical theater, and theater traditions, in which there'd be people, you know the Irishman, and the China-man, and the black laundry lady, whatever, mixing it up in all sorts of ways that were intended for comic effect. I think sometimes it was done in a very racist way, no doubt, but also it was done in other more complex ways, in which a black man in blackface created a different kind of connection that perhaps wasn't possible. Right? There's all sorts of pushback and ways of going. I'm just curious if the mix-up, including the romance, right, which is against what expectations, the audience expectations, were just what made sense in terms of, the writing and the fun you were kind of communicating.

Jeanine Tesori: I have to say, as I've gotten ... I feel like in Millie, Dick gave me a real gift by Millie, bringing it to me and asking me to do it, it was only my second show so there was a lot of guesswork. I'm surprised at how much we got right. I think one of the things in a piece where you're dealing with metaphor is we're telling Millie's story all the way through, and that's one of the reasons. There some things in Act One I would like to change rhythmically but otherwise, I think the show is very successful. Everyone is coming to seek love, and everyone has a mask of identity that hides their essence. I think the mix-ups and the farce, if it's done correctly and with a deft and human hand, can understand that what she thought she wanted she ... it ends up much deeper a journey than she thought when she looked inside the mirror. I think what we try to do is take that central journey and apply it rigorously to every single person.

The villain in musical theater is always really tricky because you ... if it's a dragon, or in these terms it's a dragon lady, and what she does, I think, it's interesting because I think if you don't go far enough, the villain is not clear. If you're a touch of it and people don't understand what's happening, everybody has to tell the central journey, the central hunger, to be seen for who they are, villain, ingenue, hero, and to get what they want in the end is the connection to someone else.

I think that's why the payoff of Act Two, that's why I knew that we had done something correct when ... You can't have a payoff of Act Two unless you have an Act One that's set itself up. The reaction to the heroes, strangely enough, of the musical turned out to be these two men. It was a great surprise that the characters told us that and we wrote I think to that. It's interesting to hear you say about, "What are they laughing at?" I think sometimes when people make fun of languages, that's where you get into a very slippery slope. That's why we made those tapes to say the Chinese must be completely accurate. It's not being done for comic effect, but they're funny, they're festive, they're clowns, in a sense and that is ...

Ken Leung: Bickering is funny.

Jeanine Tesori: Bickering is funny.

Dick Scanlan: And subverting the expectation of pidgin English, which is what the audience is expecting is, "Me no likey." They're partially laughing at their own expectations. It's funny in terms of, the mix-ups, I want to piggyback on one thing you said before I get to that, that there's four heroic characters in this piece. Millie, Muzzy, she puts her life on the line to participate in that charade of who's African American [audio cuts out] ... very personal.

I think the reason I was attracted to this story, when I firs