By Ted Shen
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“I love the musical, and I love Yul Brynner as the king,” says Irene Cualoping, who produced the coalition’s show. “I thought it would’ve been nice for kids to gather onstage to sing that chorus, because I wanted to appeal to all ages. But I understood Suci’s point of the inaccuracies in the portrayal, so we agreed to delete the song.” Then leaders from the Vietnamese community objected to the show’s title–Sayonara, Miss Saigon. “Another musical I happen to like a lot,” says Cualoping, who’s also head of the Organization of Chinese Americans. “And I’m quite aware of the casting controversy it provoked. But enough is enough, I said to everyone.”
By December the team had a working script–and then the buzz started about potentially offensive material. “We sat down with leaders from all the groups and went over the script with them,” Cualoping recalls. “We wanted to make sure there was no confusion that ours was a satire.” That was when Surapiboonchai, a nurse and a spokesperson for the Thai Association of Illinois, asked them to take out “Getting to Know You.”
And Surapiboonchai? She said she was happy that “Getting to Know You” was gone, but she wasn’t at all offended by the antics of Charlie Chan. “He’s not a king,” she explained, “so it doesn’t matter.”
