Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe musicals come to L.A.

It’s raining classic musical revivals in Los Angeles, with three shows penned by Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe poised to run concurrently this spring.

These mid-century dream teams revolutionized American theater by popularizing the integrated musical, a form which leveraged classic operetta elements like song and dance as narrative tools.

Once cutting-edge and now quintessential, productions led by these iconic writing duos, along with book writers Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, represented a growing interest among librettists in cohesive stories that offered topical cultural commentary. “Oklahoma!” (1943) is generally credited with kicking off this “Golden Age” of Broadway, which lasted roughly through the 1960s.

That Golden Age arrives in modern L.A. via “Flower Drum Song,” at East West Players through May 31; “The Sound of Music,” at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, beginning May 5; and “Brigadoon” at Pasadena Playhouse starting May 13. While each of these shows engages with its source material differently, all enable theatergoers to both explore what made them classics and discover their contemporary resonance.

“Brigadoon,” Pasadena Playhouse (May 13–June 14)

Alexandra Silber spent much of her theater career with classic musicals, and several formative years studying acting in Scotland, so she felt it was her fate to adapt Lerner and Loewe’s 1947 fantasy romp, “Brigadoon.”

The original musical tells the story of two American travelers who happen upon a mythical village in the Scottish Highlands that appears just once every 100 years. Coming after three unsuccessful early collaborations, “Brigadoon” was the first major breakthrough hit for Lerner and Loewe, acting as the turning point that established them as premier theater creators. Critics were particularly enchanted by the show’s lush score and fantastical atmosphere.

Silber loves “Brigadoon” for those reasons and more. The ways in which the show’s characters experience grief helped Silber through her own when she lost her father at age 18. But her immersion in Scottish culture taught her that Lerner and Loewe’s original book did not represent Scotland realistically. Instead, she said it leaned into sentimentality and stereotyping. In her revised book, Silber sought to remedy that, along with “Brigadoon’s” flattened female characters, while still honoring the show’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 said.

Maybe it was an instinct born from a desire to honor her own father’s memory, but Silber felt protective over Lerner’s legacy, and told his estate as much 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 said, referencing a lyric from the “Brigadoon” song “Heather on the Hill.”

In Silber’s revival, the wise schoolmaster Mr. Lundie is Widow Lundie, and the town flirt Meg Brockie is a pub owner pushing middle age. Both revised characters reflect the matriarchal history of 18th century Scotland, in which women held more powerful roles than modern society associates with old times, the playwright said.

Alexandra Silber stops to laugh at James Irvine Japanese Garden.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

“They were the keepers of wisdom and culture,” Silber said. “They made huge contributions to society and were invaluable to the [social] fabric.”

Silber’s “Brigadoon” will also feature a live traditional Scottish folk band, called a cèilidh band, accompanying Meg Brockie’s songs.

While hardly anyone bats an eye at re-imagining Shakespeare, Silber said, some people feel differently about musicals, perhaps because musical theater is sometimes perceived as an unserious medium. However, “when regarded with seriousness and not with an eye roll, these are great works of art,” she said.

In the case of “Brigadoon,” Lerner and Loewe composed a musical that recognized the global scar of World War II, and in its insistence that love transcended loss, gave people the catharsis they needed. Just like Rodgers and Hammerstein, they were sensitive to their current moment and sought to use art to guide their peers through it, Silber said.

To her, “Brigadoon” coming to L.A. at the same time as 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 said.

“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 show has been reimagined by Tony Award-winner David Henry Hwang.

(Mike Palma)

In his 2026 revival of “Flower Drum Song,” David Henry Hwang is not solely in conversation with the musical’s original composers, but also with himself.

The Tony Award-winning playwright first adapted Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1958 classic set in San Francisco’s Chinatown a quarter-century ago, as “revisicals” — in which original songs were preserved, but books were rewritten for the modern era — were cropping up left and right.

“At that point, ‘Flower Drum Song’ was a musical that just wasn’t being produced much at all,” Hwang said. “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.”

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 found himself in talks with East West Players’ artistic director Lily Tung Crystal about which of his shows could join the company’s 60th anniversary lineup. They toyed with “M. Butterfly,” the masterpiece that earned Hwang his Tony, but kept gravitating toward “Flower Drum Song.”

Part of the intrigue for Hwang lay in the fact that as he read his 2001 book decades later, he felt the same way he had when he first consulted Rodgers and Hammerstein’s in 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 version imagines the production “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 could have written a new, original work, but he felt there was something distinctly powerful about bringing back a Golden Age musical that was so radical in its time.

Rodgers and Hammerstein composed “Flower Drum Song” in 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 times inauthentic depictions of Asian Americans in 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 said.

Hwang said that he believes Golden Age theater is uniquely positioned to ease theatergoers into more critically examining our present moment.

“It has the comfort elements of nostalgia. At the same time, it’s looked at through new eyes and a new lens,” he said. “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 said about “The Sound of Music.”

(Jeremy Daniel)

Jack O’Brien, who directed “The Sound of Music” revival more than a decade ago, once raved about a Russian production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical in a letter to a producer, which made its way to Tim Crouse — son of book writer Russel Crouse.

“I read, like, four sentences in his description, and it was obvious that he had a real affinity for the show,” Crouse said, adding that he knew O’Brien — who previously led the Old Globe in San Diego — was the man for the job.

The 1965 film adaptation of “The Sound of Music” broke box office records, and went on to replace “Gone With the Wind” as the highest-grossing film of all time, turning Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical into a worldwide phenomenon.

“But [the film’s success has] also been a hindrance,” Crouse said, “because people want to sneak the movie into the show … and the show is a different animal.”

While the film adaptation’s political themes are toned down, the original musical focused on the dark atmosphere of the Nazi annexation of Austria and the Von Trapp family’s struggle for freedom.

Julie Andrews in a scene from the 1965 film, “The Sound of Music.”

(Twentieth Century-Fox)

O’Brien, in his 2015 production of “The Sound of Music” at 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 said.

For Crouse, the musical is about many things: music itself, of course, but also vocation, integrity and faith: “There was a lot for them to get their teeth into in terms of a story.”

That certainly appealed to Hammerstein, he said, whose librettos tended to have political aspects to them. Crouse’s father and his partner had a similar habit of writing stories with political undertones, Crouse said, asking audiences, “Who are you when the whistle blows?”

At the time “The Sound of Music” first arrived, that question might have been more pointed, with a global war not far in the rearview. That’s what made it so resonant at the time, Crouse said.

Yet, he said, watching the musical today, he sees its central questions are just as relevant as they were when his father’s show first premiered.

“What are you going to do with your life? How are you going to find out? Why are you here?” he said. “Those are timeless issues, and obviously they have a certain pertinence today in the United States of America.”