The musical proved difficult to produce for amateur and school groups, however, because it requires a cast either Asian or made up as Asian. Even professional companies found it difficult to round up an entire cast of Asian singer-dancer-actors. By the late 1960s, the musical was rarely staged, and was often relegated to dinner theater productions. The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, which licenses the partnership's works, believes that the work's loss of popularity was due in part to increased racial sensitivity in the U. S. after the civil rights movement. In addition, producers found the show to be thinly plotted, and the songs not integrated as organically with the characters and story, as compared with Rodgers and Hammerstein's most popular musicals.