Getting to know you again... and what a joy!
RODGERS and Hammerstein’s 1951 musical The King And I might not pass muster with today’s egalitarianism commissars.
The story has a bare-tummied Siamese absolute monarch who expects his many wives to kneel before him like frogs.
He hires an English schoolmistress who tells the Orientals to dress like Westerners to appease colonial Britain. Not that she herself – the minx – is averse to a spot of foreign tyrant, even after he threatens to whip a bare-backed young woman who was enslaved in his harem.
Blimey. If a modern showtunes duo produced that plot, imagine the protests at the next Oliviers ceremony. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s press office would need to hire more staff, simply to issue Greg Doran’s pompous denunciations of Rodgers and Hammerstein for various ‘ism’s.
Happily, life was less complicated in 1951 and this show has long delighted audiences with a score including I Whistle A Happy Tune, Getting To Know You, Shall We Dance? and repeated wallops of a big gong.
The music is played sumptuously by a compact orchestra, and in Kelli O’Hara this imported production has a leading lady with the complete musical-theatre voice. She plays Anna, a well- connected widow who arrives in Siam to teach the royal children. When Miss O’Hara appears – the first time at the prow of a steamer – you don’t just hear the melody. It is as though her voice seals every exit.
The Palladium’s large space is made to feel intimate, somehow coated by the creamy completeness of her singing. Forgive this American star, making her West End debut, the occasional infelicity in her spoken English and her inability to whistle. We came to hear her sing and she does just that, big-time.
It is hard to be as enthusiastic about Ken Watanabe as the king. Perhaps half his lyrics are inaudible. This is the role that was played for more than 4,000 performances by the late Yul Brynner. He managed to make the king more manly, more lithe, more brisk – yet less guttural. Director Bartlett Sher could not be accused of hurrying things. The evening lasts almost three hours and, if there are slow passages, they give you a chance to admire a tall-columned set and shimmering gold curtains which turn to silver in a switch of lights.
Na-Young Jeon sings agreeably as Tuptim, the girl forced to abandon her lover to join the king’s bed. Dean John-Wilson, as her boyfriend, shows us his pecs but has a light workload. The adult performers are repeatedly upstaged by the king’s fleet of sweet children, the youngest barely more than a toddler.
Thanks to Miss O’Hara, this is a night of old-fashioned glamour. And who can resist a show with the line, ‘A flock of sheep and you’re the only ram, no wonder you’re the wonder of Siam’?