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As a representative expression of Dunhuang music and dance culture, the dance drama Silk Road Flower Rain not only embodies the historical and cultural legacy of the ancient Silk Road but also functions as an important vehicle for transmitting traditional Chinese culture and reinforcing cultural confidence. This study quantifies the perceived social value of Silk Road Flower Rain using penalized linear regression applied to Likert-scale survey data. We estimate standardized effects of community participation and cross-regional exchange on a composite outcome combining social identity and public engagement. Statistical inference for the ridge estimator was obtained via permutation- and bootstrap-based procedures with 10,000 resamples, yielding two-sided 95% confidence intervals and family-wise error rate–adjusted p-values. Out-of-sample performance was assessed by repeated 10-fold cross-validation (50 repetitions), producing a mean cross-validated R2 of 0.90 (SD= 0.05) and a mean absolute error of 0.23 (SD=0.04) on the 1–5 response scale, adjusted p<0.05. All predictors showed statistically significant positive effects on the composite social-value outcome; social participation emerged as the principal driver, and youth cultural education was identified as an area requiring targeted improvement. Robustness checks using ordinal logistic regression corroborated the direction and relative magnitude of coefficients across model specifications. Drawing on these results, we propose a targeted optimization framework to enhance the social value of Silk Road Flower Rain: (1) establish a community–university–theater coordination mechanism to strengthen public participation; (2) develop an integrated curriculum–practice–digital system to improve youth cultural education; and (3) leverage policy support and international exchange to broaden the cultural influence of Dunhuang music and dance. This study addresses a gap in quantitative investigations of the social value of Dunhuang music and dance and provides evidence-based, practice-oriented guidance for the contemporary transmission and promotion of this cultural form.