How the King and I found our sparkle

BARTLETT SHER leapt from his ringside seat to suggest how Annalene Beechey might speak a line in The King And I.

‘The only way to get the better of the British is to stand up to them!’ Ms Beechey, playing the governess Anna Leonowens, explains to Jose Llana’s King of Siam.

Sher, the resident director of New York’s Lincoln Center Theater, was in London to dissect the Rodgers and Hammerstein show with his cast before they embark on a tour, which begins at the Manchester Opera House on April 26 and then heads to Dublin, Sunderland, Edinburgh, Leeds and eight other theatres.

There’ll be a month-long break in the summer when Kelli O’Hara and Ken Watanabe, the original leads of the glorious revival that opened at Lincoln Center four years ago and played the London Palladium last year, take the show to Tokyo, before the tour resumes.

Beechey was O’Hara’s principal cover at the Palladium and Sher liked the ‘sophisticated intelligence’ she brought to the role.

Llana took over from Watanabe in New York. His association with the classic musical goes back to 1996, when he made his debut as Lun Getting to know you: Beechey and Sher Tha, the Burmese scholar who falls for one of the king’s favourites.

Bartlett said that each couple that plays the king and ‘Mrs Anna’ is different, ‘so you want to find their thing, their sparkle’.

He found Beechey and Llana’s sparkle, as it were, during the scene where the king brings up Moses and Abraham Lincoln, and then makes Anna prostrate herself before him. It’s all misdirection, so the monarch can get her advice on how to show the Brits that he’s not a barbarian.

Llana said that at its core, The King And I is ‘about a father trying to protect his wives and his children’ and also ‘a strong outspoken woman’. ‘Rodgers and Hammerstein were progressive, in that they long ago had shows championing women speaking up and saying what they feel.’

Beechey hailed Anna as a ‘great role model for women and children’. She took her own children, aged nearly nine (her birthday’s tomorrow) and eight, to see the King And I at the Palladium and they loved it. ‘The show’s going to be with them for a long time.’

Now we need to see Sher’s fabulous Lincoln Center production of another golden age musical treasure, My Fair Lady, with our very own Harry Haden-Patton. There’s a lot of unconfirmed chatter that it might end up at the Palladium sometime in 2020 or 2021.