far out far east showgirls bring exotic excitement to american showbiz
On Broadway
The latest attempt to escape from hackneydom is the Chinatown play, imported, of course, from America," wrote an Irish gentleman, London drama critic G. B. Shaw, in 1897. The latest attempt to escape from hackneydom, circa 1959, is the Asian showgirl, imported, of course, from Asia, or at least from the ranks of Asian-American citizens. Gone, happily, are the days when the showbiz idea of Asian beauty was Myrna Loy with upswept eyebrows as The Daughter of Fu Manchu. Now, the legitimate stages of Broadway and the desert casinos of Las Vegas have become truly oriented to the Orient and are featuring far-out Far East femininity which is (if we may be allowed to shift gears and invoke the name of another Irish gentleman) the McCoy.
Oriental Sex
Strippers And Chippies, Asian style, are the principal objects of interest in two girl-packed Broadway shows, Flower Drum Song and The World of Suzie Wong. In Flower Drum, pop songbelter Pat Suzuki belts out Rodgers-and-Hammerstein songs and plays a nubile night-club ecdysiast in San Francisco's China-town, who finds herself the sexy center of a conflict between the traditions of the Old World and the New. The title role of Suzie Wong is played by the lovely Eurasian actress, France Nuyen. Suzie, to put it bluntly, is a Hong Kong whore; like her Western sister-under-the-skin, Sadie Thompson, she eventually finds true love in the arms of an understanding American boy. Suzuki and Nuyen, in their respective shows, are surrounded by scads of slit-skirt sirens.
In Las Vegas
The Wild West has met the Mysterious East with a maximum of concord in Las Vegas. The scintillescent Nevada town, for some time now the nudity nexus of the nation, has spotlighted a featured showgirl of Asian lineage, Tokyo-born Muneko Yashi (the name translates as Coconut Chest, and it's phony, which her 40-inch chest is not). Appearing bare-bosomed in the Arabian Room of the Dunes, whither she was airplaned by her mentor, Harold Minsky, she has been in this country just since October, and is the only Asian girl Mr. Minsky has ever employed in his half-century career. Over at the Thunderbird, Oriental sex takes the fair form of the China Doll Revue, chiefly a leg show displaying the lissome limbs of ladies with names like Toy, Wing and Keiko.
