The social contract in the theater ain’t what it used to be. Back in the day, not so long ago, audiences could count on actors to explore their characters. Today, it’s overwhelmingly the case that actors shanghai their roles for purposes of self-celebration. The East West Players’ joyous and exceedingly peculiar revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s intermittently comic but fundamentally earnest Chinatown musical of 1958 plays a lot less like The King and I or The Sound of Music than like La Cage aux Folles. I am what I am! David Henry Hwang, who did a radical overhaul of the show’s book once before, now takes a second bite of the apple. Whereas the original novel by C. Y. Lee contemplated the crumbling of Chinese tradition in the rough and tumble of the American experience, Hwang celebrates the evolving cultures-within-cultures of the generations that followed later. Fair enough. The show-stopping nightclub number hammers home the reigning metaphor. So what if chop suey isn’t Chinese from China? It’s authentic Chinese-American! —Matthew Gurewitsch