Casting Call Still a Whisper : Hiring: The ‘Miss Saigon’ controversy has bared the bitterness among actors and actresses of color over the inequities they see in film, theater and television casting.

Actor Ernest Harada was 14 and living in far off Hawaii when the musical “Flower Drum Song” premiered in New York.

The first big Broadway musical with a large Asian-American cast, “Flower Drum” was set in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The plot featured a timid “picture bride” just off the boat from China, her traditionalist parents, young Americanized friends and the usual romantic crises of an American musical.

The teen-ager played the show’s cast album over and over, until he knew all the songs. The stars of the show--James Shigeta, Nancy Kwan, Jack Soo--became legends for the young Harada, who is today helping to lead a protest that, ironically, is keeping dozens of Asian actors off a Broadway stage.

“ ‘Flower Drum Song’ was absolutely wonderful,” Harada, now 45, remembers, “because for the first time I had Asians to look up to as Broadway stars.”

But there were not many big shows for Asians on the stages of New York after that--only Stephen Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures,” which ran for 193 performances in New York in 1976 and toured Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles--and in which Harada was a key player.

“Shogun”--based on James Clavell’s novel of 17th Century Japan--is currently in previews in Washington. And, until last week, Cameron Mackintosh’s much anticipated, and now much debated, “Miss Saigon” promised to be one of the high points of the coming theater season.

Now, however, “Miss Saigon” is likely to be remembered as the musical that raised the curtain on what many see as a show business color code, baring a deep bitterness among actors and actresses of color over Broadway’s and Hollywood’s long history of hiring white men and women to play the roles of Asians, Indians, blacks and other minorities.

“There is no way we can stop ‘yellowface’ in the lead roles unless we take a stand,” says Harada, president of the Assn. of Asian Pacific American Artists, “and this is the one that the union finally agreed with us on.

“This is an old, old, old battle, and it’s a precedent that the union has come around and said, ‘We’ll support the minority artist.’ ”

Last Wednesday, Mackintosh, the British producer of the London hit “Miss Saigon,” canceled next spring’s Broadway premiere of the musical when Actors’ Equity vetoed the casting of Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce in the lead role of the Eurasian Engineer, a pimp in a Saigon brothel. With the dearth of leading roles for minorities in mind, some members of the union objected to a white actor playing a minority role and petitioned the union to forbid Pryce from recreating his role in New York.

The 39,000-member union has come under tremendous criticism in the last week, and after receiving a petition to re-evaluate its position signed by more than 150 union members in good standing, its governing council is scheduled to reconsider the veto at a meeting today. Harada and other Asian-American actors sent the union a statement saying in part, “do not waver; do not falter. There are more important moral and social issues at stake.”

“Miss Saigon” would have provided at least 34 jobs for Asian Americans and other minority actors, and that’s one of the arguments used by those, including some Asian American actors, who oppose the Actor’s Equity veto. Still, Asian-American actor Darrell Kunitomi says “that argument of ‘lost employment’ doesn’t hold water.”

“The roles we are allegedly losing,” he says, “are about a dozen prostitutes, bar girls--they’re just lost crumbs.”

“The other ‘crumby’ parts we lost” he says, “are Viet Cong soldiers who serve as window-dressing and extras, like the classic spear-carriers in a Shakespeare play. When they try to minoritize TV and films that’s what they give us--the crumbs.”

According to actors’ unions representatives, minorities are underrepresented in the entertainment world in comparison to their percentages of the national population.

Although the non-white ethnic groups in the 1989 census estimates made up 22.5% of the American population, the Screen Actors Guild says that only 15%-16% of film and television jobs went to minority actors, slightly up from 14.3% in 1987. Roles in commercials for the guild’s minority actors, according to the guild’s latest 1987 figures, amounted to 12% of all guild commercials jobs.

The guild, which counts 8,250 minorities among its 62,500 membership says the employment outlook is improving for minority actors. But, according to the guild’s affirmative action administrator, Rodney Mitchell, change is coming at “an almost glacier-like pace.”

“The bulk of the improvement is in the increase of roles for ethnic males,” says Mitchell. “Ethnic females continue to have a difficult time securing employment.”

Steve Park, a 28-year-old Asian-American actor, recently played the irate Korean fruit vendor in Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing.” Soon after, he was cast in Bill Murray’s “Quick Change” as another Korean fruit vendor. “I thought, hey maybe I’ve hit the Korean fruit market circuit,” he says.

Still, it’s frustrating to Park that “Korean fruit market vendors are the new Asian paradigm; they’re something easily identifiable and easily replaceable in a way. . . . The unfortunate thing is: look at a soap opera, for instance, where the setting is a hospital. Most hospitals are staffed by people from a lot of different countries, a lot of Asians, but you won’t see that reflected on TV. “

Kunitomi, who works a day job as a tour guide at The Times, is currently appearing in “A-Bomb Beauties,” a play at the Burbage Theater in West Los Angeles that interweaves events from the Hiroshima tragedy. He says he hardly ever gets to try out for lead roles in film or television because they’re rarely written for minorities. To illustrate, he describes the time he auditioned for a role in a television show, saw two black actors and a Latino actor sitting in the casting office, and said, ‘Well, fellas what two lines are we reading for?”

Kunitomi did get the part--a paramedic with four lines.

“It seems every TV show will do a Chinatown show eventually: the ‘A-Team,’ ‘T.J. Hooker,’ whoever, goes to Chinatown to break up the opium ring or find the missing jade doll. So there’s a usually a part for a Bad Chinese Overlord; there’s a Young Kung Fu Artist, there’s the Beautiful Young Jade-Like Daughter. . . .”

But these roles, he says, tend to be cameos, stereotypic, and unsubstantive. “There are Asian-American dentists, doctors, cops, coaches, teachers,” says Kunitomi. “We fill every part of society, and yet we are not represented.”

Belva Davis, the national equal employment opportunity chair for the 77,000-member American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, says that although the picture is looking better overall, film roles, particularly for women of color, are not showing gains.

“Commercials are looking much better, and we’ve had some cordial talks with the networks about increasing minority casting in daytime programming. Prime time programming we didn’t look at. The ‘Cosby Show’ alone has changed the complexion of prime time.”

Her lobbying philosophy stems from showing networks that representing minority groups through minority actors makes good business sense.

“We’ll mention things like blacks watch 55% more daytime programming than non-blacks, and point out the disposable income they have; (and by pointing this out), we seem to be changing some programming habits.”

There just aren’t that many important roles in an industry which black actress Beverly Todd says, “is not controlled by us.”

“I see more and more of us taking control of the product. People like (writer-director Spike) Lee and (writer-director Robert) Townsend are an example and a trend. So, with or without the support of the powers-that-be, they are creating vehicles for us to work in. The new crop will be in better shape.”

Natsuko Ohama an Asian-American actress who last appeared in the television show “Hiroshima: Out of the Ashes” should know. For her, the problem has not been getting work; “it’s the quality of the work,” she says.

“I’m sure if I wanted to I could be an extra walking around in the background with no lines and work all the time, because, in some way, people are aware that Asians are part of our society now--so we can work in the office in the background, shuffling papers, or being in elevators or hospitals. But as far as taking a major role in speaking or leading roles it’s very difficult.”

For Ernest Harada, his major role came 18 years after Broadway first pulled the curtain up on “Flower Drum Song.”

Although not a box office success, Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures” is today considered a landmark piece of musical theater. Opening in Japan in the mid 1800s, the plot advances to the present and is about the gradual Westernization of Japanese society.

The show saw the then unprecedented use of elements of Kabuki theater: the way an all-male cast played female and male characters interchangeably. There was the sparse, abstract, set, with a floor made of elegant, white maple, and scrims, walkways and sliding screens painted Hokusai-style, and Sondheim’s complex score which attempted to convey the sounds of two cultures and how they gradually influenced each other.

In Kabuki tradition, Harada played several roles, including the Madam who has a saucy number in which she tries to turn klutzy Japanese farm girls into accomplished courtesans for American traders (“Welcome to Kanagawa”)--and a Gilbert-and-Sullivanesque British Ambassador.

But, like all shows, “Pacific Overtures” eventually closed, and, as Harada says, “That was it. There were no Broadway shows after that--until this year.”