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Getting to know you ...again
A sumptuous new production of The King And I, with all those songs you can’t help but sing along to, has come to the UK. And Nicole Lampert was allowed backstage
Kelli O’Hara, the Tony award-winning queen of the Broadway musical, is looking really most unregal. Sprawled out on the floor having tripped over the voluminous skirt favoured by The King And I’s Anna Leonowens, she had disastrously forgotten the cardinal rule of playing the teacher hired by the King of Siam for his children – you must keep your back straight at all times, even in rehearsals.
The 22 children surrounding her, who make up part of the huge, 50-strong cast of this London production of the award-winning revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, have seen enough people crashing and falling not to even look up from their various card games. The orchestra restarts Shall We Dance?, and a big grin spreads across Kelli’s face as she rehearses the song once again ahead of the show’s London Palladium run.
‘I didn’t think I’d remember any of the dances but as soon as I heard the music my body started moving in ways I had quite forgotten,’ she says later as she smooths out the lavender duchess satin skirt. She played Anna for a year on Broadway when this production debuted in America, picking up a Tony award along the way, but has had a break from the role for more than two years, dur ing which time she’s been singing in Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
‘Sometimes I forget to stand up as straight, as Anna needs to. I’m not tripping up anywhere near as much as I used to when I first started rehearsing the role but I do have to remember that the back has to be completely straight. If it’s not, the dress won’t flop out in front of you and you end up on your hands and knees. It does take quite a lot of getting used to.’
That’s not the only issue with Anna’s outfit, which includes a steel hoop under her skirts, with several petticoats in between, and a pair of pantaloons as well. It might look magical and a bit funny – and is worth a cool £15,000 – but Kelli has learned to her cost why Victorian ladies had a habit of fainting. ‘This skirt weighs 40lb and it’s taken its toll on my back and ankles. I met Elaine Paige, who has played Anna before, when I was a few months into the role and she asked, “How’s your back?” It felt fine then but I soon learned what she meant.’
The ostentatious gown and its two slightly smaller companion outfits have also given her an idea about being a woman through the ages. ‘I can feel quite lonely in the outfits,’ says Kelli. ‘No one can get close to me. And because I can’t fit through doors I have my own dressing room just next to the stage, and people have to come and visit me. Wearing the dress is an interesting exercise in what women have really gone through in the past.’
The musical itself, while packed with familiar tunes including Getting To Know You, Shall We Dance?, I Whistle A Happy Tune and Hello Young Lovers, is a history lesson, too, as it’s based on true events. First staged in 1951, it was inspired by a novel published seven years earlier, which was in turn based on the memoirs of the real Anna Leonowens, a purportedly British widow who travelled to Siam – as Thailand was then known – with her five-year-old son Louis in the 1860s to teach the many children and wives of the country’s king, Mongkut. Anna’s story reached a wider audience in 1956, when the musical was turned into a film starring Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr. It won five Academy Awards, but Kelli had never seen it before taking on the role.
The tale as it is told on stage now begins with the ar rival of the recently widowed Anna in Siam with Louis (played as a ten-year-old in this production). She has been appointed by the king to educate the multitude of children from his harem along Western lines, even though his most senior adviser, Kralahome, is sure no good can come of this.
Her arrival coincides with that of female slave Tuptim, a gift to the king from neighbouring Burma. Tuptim has fallen in love with Lun Tha, the emissary who has travelled with her from Burma, and the young couple gain Anna’s friendship. She remembers what it means to be in love too.
Very quickly Anna makes her presence felt. She falls out with the king over his broken promise that she and Louis would have their own house but she’s taken by his willingness to learn about science and the Western world. She becomes his ally in protecting his kingdom from nations – including her own – intent on taking the ‘savage’ Siam for themselves. Just as her charges – including the future king Prince Chulalongkorn – learn from her, so she realises she has been taught by them. She and the king form a special bond.
Despite her attire, Anna is, peculiarly, an almost modern woman. She has no compunction about standing up to the ruler of Siam and is the voice of enlightenment as she brings the educated Western world into the religious and traditional Eastern one. It is partly why the tale remains relevant despite being set at the height of British Empire-building in 1862, according to the Palladium run’s English producer Sir Howard Panter.
‘It is a history piece about a con- flicted king who is part of a traditional society in a changing world, but it also feels very contemporary because the human condition hasn’t changed that much,’ he says. ‘At the heart of it are two people who care very deeply for each other, but there are also these huge cultural differences.
‘It is about two cultures coming together and it feels very relevant in the year when we’ve had a royal wedding which celebrated exactly that. When two cultures meet, that’s interesting, that’s human.’
For Kelli, the theme of this production is summed up in the catchy but childish song Getting To Know You, one of the most memorable tunes in musical history. ‘ We’ve added the wives into the song and made it special,’ she says. ‘It is about learning about each other, becoming more educated, and becoming more
‘The tale remains very relevant, it feels modern’
confident in who we actually are.’
Ken Watanabe, the Japanese actor who received an Oscar nomination for his performance in 2003 film The Last Samurai, plays the king. ‘I had preconceptions that this story was dated, however I never realised that it encapsulated so many themes on so many levels,’ he says. ‘ It shows how friction between people is eased by understanding and respecting each other. The same can be said for countries today.’
Ken’s presence is an indication of how the musical has been modernised. In the very first Broadway production just two out of the 70 cast members were of Asian heritage, despite the majority of the characters coming from Thailand. Yul Brynner, who made the role of the king his own in the film, a television series in the early 1970s and on stage around the world, was Rus-
sian, but he claimed to be partly of Mongol heritage.
In this latest version, which was first staged at New York’s Lincoln Center in 2015, the majority of the cast are of Eastern heritage. That doesn’t mean it was easy for the producers to find their king. The ghost of Brynner lingered on.
Ken, who was spotted by the show’s director Bartlett Sher in 2006 film Letters From Iwo Jima, is one of Japan’s biggest actors and admits to having doubts when he was offered the role. But he grew to love it – and it won him his first Tony nomination. ‘When I heard from Bart I was surprised,’ he admits. ‘But when he told me about his vision for the role, I became interested. When the Broadway run finished, I didn’t want this journey to be over so I’m grateful to be playing the king again. London is a holy place for actors; it’s the home of the National and Shakespeare, so I’m excited but nervous.’ As well as singing and acting in a language which is not his own, he has
to tackle the memory of Brynner. ‘Before we started, people had views on whether he could be as good as Yul Brynner, but he was,’ says Sir Howard Panter. ‘Ken is a new king, he’s remarkable. He is The King. He is extraordinarily charismatic but wonderfully vulnerable. His acting breaks your heart. He shows the dilemma of being a king who’s meant to be all-powerful but is a vulnerable, lonely human underneath. He’s caught in a time of great change, and this woman coming to his court and teaching them about the outside world causes him great confusion. I defy anyone not to have a tear in their eye watching Ken.’
Oklahoma-born Kelli also admits ‘a little nervousness’ about playing a Brit in front of a mainly British audience. As we talk she repeats the way I say several words, perfecting her accent.
It has taken two years to bring the show to London because both Ken and Kelli, as well as many others from the Broadway version, have been so busy with other work. Their hectic schedules mean the production, which now has a mainly British company, is tied to a tight 14-week run at the Palladium, although there will be a new nationwide production with other actors next year. There are also plans for it to move
on to Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, India and Australia.
The film of the musical looms large in any fan’s imagination but this version deliberately steps away from it. Bartlett Sher says he didn’t watch it again before starting work, nor did most of the cast. ‘I think the sense of the exotic East is very different now to how it was in the 1950s,’ he says. ‘In the original there was an orientalism to the approach – it was this exotic world. I wanted to strip it back and make it more of a historical drama. I wanted less gold and exotic, and more about the human behaviour.’
But audiences at the Palladium are still in for a real visual treat. This is a true beast of a show, with more than 300 costumes using up 2,500 metres of fabric and 22,000 flowers made in a workshop in Japan. The palace design is based on a Buddhist monastery – t he act ua l royal palace was deemed too fussy for the stage – while golden Buddhas are replicas of Thai ones. Fans for the dancers were flown in from Japan because they open and shut in a specific way, while so much vintage Indian silk was used to make the Siamese costumes that worldwide stock of the material has almost completely been depleted.
A particular challenge has been re- setting the production from Broadway’s Lincoln Center, which has a wider stage and ‘a thrust’ that goes out into the audience, to the smaller, more traditional proscenium stage of the Palladium. Dances have been re- choreographed and sets made smaller.
But it is a well- oiled machine and the London production is all about fine-tuning. ‘It’s like having a house where you can go and repaint the rooms, remake the beds; make it better and different. It’s our chance to perfect it,’ says Christopher Gattelli, the choreog-
rapher of both the New York and London productions, who’s been astounded by the quality of dancing from his UK ensemble. ‘This company has taken my breath away,’ he adds. ‘The dancers are spectacular so we have made the performances better, richer and more technical because we know they can do it; they have inspired us to make it more beautiful.’
Given that the show has run before, those in charge can anticipate problems before they happen. Costume designer Catherine Zuber knew the pockets of the children’s clothes had to be sewn up otherwise they’d fiddle with them so much that they’d go out of shape. That’s particularly important as this time she has 22 child actors – more than three times as many as the New York production, because the UK has stricter laws on the hours children can work so they rotate through the performances. All the adu lt cast have been sent notes reminding them not to use inappropriate language in front of the children – and they mustn’t encourage naughtiness.
Anna’s Victorian bed, based on an original vintage one, has now been lowered because it was too high for the scene of her packing when she sings Shall I Tell You What I Think Of You?. And the boat she arrives on, based on a Victorian tender, has cleverly been made (after months of work) so that it can break into three pieces and be re-used as market stalls.
Fortune is smiling on the production as even the red and gold colours of the king’s palace coincidentally match the Palladium’s furnishings. All is set for a triumph – as long as the leading lady remembers to stand up straight. The King And I runs at the London Palladium until 29 September. For tickets, visit kingandimusical.co. uk or call 0207 087 7757.
‘The dancing is better and richer, more beautiful’