Drowsy chaperone youtube1/2/2024 The song seems to draw heavily from "The King and I," ( ) and the ways that play perpetuated racism. A slap in the face to four thousand years of Chinese history" (, and here is another example of the performance that includes that commentary: ). The commentary the Man in Chair gives for the song includes "a degrading piece of Chinoiserie about an Emperor who is told by a magic bird to marry his American Elocutionist instead of his betrothed and he ends up building the Great Wall of China. The "Message from a Nightingale" song plays because the Man in Chair accidentally plays the wrong side of the record, which is from another play with the same cast as the one he was originally sharing (which means the actors in various roles in the main play within a play are the same ones in the "Message from a Nightingale" song and that I might play one of the Asian characters in this song if I were included in the production). The entire show is a play within a play, with a person, called the "Man in Chair," sharing this musical in the form of phonograph records and giving commentary on the show as it progresses. Looking further into the matter online, I found that the song is meant to satirize/make fun of the racism that was so common during early Broadway musicals (for context, the entire play satirizes various aspects of 1920's Broadway). I am white and am considering auditioning for a production of the Broadway play "The Drowsy Chaperone." However, while listening to the play's soundtrack, I found the song "Message from a Nightingale," which invokes a variety of Asian stereotypes (here is an example of the performance: ).
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