Kaua‘i born-and-raised singer and actress Harriet Yamasaki played the female leading role of Linda Low, the bold and brassy nightclub singer and dancer in the Rogers and Hammerstein musical comedy “Flower Drum Song,” for 464 performances at London’s Palace Theater
Kaua‘i born-and-raised singer and actress Harriet Yamasaki played the female leading role of Linda Low, the bold and brassy nightclub singer and dancer in the Rogers and Hammerstein musical comedy “Flower Drum Song,” for 464 performances at London’s Palace Theater beginning on March 24, 1960.
“Flower Drum Song,” which is based on the homonymous novel written by Chinese-American author C. Y. Lee, is a three-fold romance set in San Francisco’s Chinatown. In one of these love affairs, actor Kevin Scott’s character, the naive Wang Ta, is smitten by Harriet’s vivacious Linda Low.
While growing up on Kaua‘i, Yamasaki, a graduate of Kaua‘i High School, Class of 1951, developed her natural singing talent in the Lihu‘e Christian Church choir. And later, while attending Oberlin College, she traveled through many states giving concerts with the college choir.
Upon her return to Hawai‘i, Harriet taught voice and piano at Punahou and played the lead in the musicals “Kiss Me Kate,” “Kismet,” and “Thirteen Daughters” produced by the Honolulu Community Theater.
In 1959, after two years of studying singing in Paris with Professor Pierre Bernac and at the Ecole Normale de Musique, she received her concert artist’s diploma, which qualified her to successfully audition for “Flower Drum Song” director Jerome Whyte.
Harriet, whose stage name was Yama Saki, had been recommended for the role by Honolulu-born singer and actor Ed Kenney, who’d played the part of Wang Ta in the original 1958 Broadway production of “Flower Drum Song.”
Among her performances during her longtime residence in Montreal, Canada, was the lead in another Rogers and Hammerstein musical, the “The King And I,” and in the comic opera “Boccaccio” by Franz von Suppé.
Lihu‘e resident Harriet Yamasaki was married to Canadian engineer Joseph W. Coyle and they had four children.
