WHY THE KING AND I IS ALL SET TO RULE THE WORLD
As the record-breaking musical arrives in the West End this week, we speak to the two stars and director to discover the secrets behind this magical production
By
KELLI O’Hara knows all eyes will be on her this evening. She’s the leading lady in the new West End production of musical The King And I, which is breaking records even before its official opening tonight.
And while theatregoers may marvel at the £15,000 gown she has to wear – weighing in at an eye-watering 40lb – Kelli herself is not a fan. “I can’t even hang it up. It’s why my dressing room is so near the stage because I can’t fit through normal doors when I’m wearing it. And I haven’t been able to run for a tea break in rehearsals because I can’t get out of it in time.”
The lavishly hooped skirt also means that people can’t get physically close to her character, governess Anna Leonowens, hired by Siam’s King Mongkut to educate some of his 82 children from 35 wives.
“But that was the intention,” she says. “I don’t like it but in that day and age, when Anna was a woman travelling on her own with her child, it offered a layer of protection she very much needed. Even so, the costume makes this one of the loneliest roles I’ve ever played.”
It is also the biggest role she has yet taken on. This latest production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic arrives here from New York’s Lincoln Center trailing the sort of fivestar notices any actor would kill for.
More than 100,000 tickets have already been sold for the 14-week run to the end of September and there’s talk of a national tour before the production moves on to Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, India and Australia.
So what first attracted director Bartlett Sher to revive a musical staged so many times before? “I’d directed South Pacific and Carousel at the Lincoln Center,” he says, “and The King And I just felt like the next great musical ripe for revival. And by that stage Kelli had grown to the point that I felt she was really in the pocket to play Anna.”
But the challenge was finding the man who not only could convey the gravitas of the King but also erase the memory of Yul Brynner in the role.
“I’d recently seen the war film Letters From Iwo Jima in which Ken Watanabe had played the Japanese commander and had the sort of stature I felt we needed,” explains Sher. “And he’d obviously be able to bring a strong sense of Asia to the piece.”
Ken himself was much less sure. “I got a call from Bart five years ago but I was initially reluctant,” he says. “Then he came to Vancouver where I was shooting Godzilla and I began to become persuaded by his vision of how he would handle this classic. But the West End is the Holy Grail of theatre so I was nervous in advance.”
Even at the first read-through Ken admitted: “I didn’t have any experience acting in English on the stage,” he says. “It’s different in movies. If you go wrong you can do it again. Also, I’d never been in a musical.”
Everything changed at the first workshop when Kelli sang Hello