Ravishing revival of a show easier to admire than love
Can you love The King and I wholly and unreservedly? I don’t think it’s getting too absurdly politically correct to suggest that it ranks as one of the most problematic musicals of the 20thcentury American canon.
At its core lies the archetypal stuff of romance: a tentative amorous encounter between two people who could hardly be further removed in status: the King of Siam and Anna, a plucky British widow entrusted, circa 1862, with teaching his polygamous brood. East meets West at the height of Victorian imperialism.
In this Bartlett Sher-directed production, originating from New York, Kelli O’hara, transfixingly self-possessed and serenely smiling, faces the stern, hands-on-hips presence of Ken Watanabe, in roles made famous by Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner in the 1956 film.
What pulls the almost-couple apart fast are the adversarial forces of authoritarianism and individualism, reaction and progress, chauvinism and feminism: at the climax, the King supervises the punishment of Tuptim, one of his wives, who has tried to flee the royal harem in order to elope with her lover. It’s a moment of complete rupture: in order to satisfy Anna’s plea for clemency, this absolutist figure must unman, even unking, himself; the trauma of it “kills” him.
That broadly corresponds with recorded events. You have only to read
The Romance of the Harem (1873) by the real-life Anna (Leonowens), which fed into the 1944 Margaret Landon novel on which Rodgers and Hammerstein based their show, to glean that the suffering figure of Tuptim isn’t a fiction; she existed and paid a terrible price for her forbidden love. And Leonowens was appalled by King Mongkut’s harshness.
In theatricalising “difference”, you risk stereotyping it, promulgating caricature, compounding the racist aspects of the West’s colonialist past. Yet this revival (which won four Tonys in 2015) powerfully makes the case for it not only through enlisting a predominantly Asian cast but in indicating how alert the material is to the problems of superficial representation. Hammerstein himself said: “It is a very strange play and must be accepted on its own terms.”
In old-fashioned Broadway terms, the production looks and sounds ravishing. At the start, a large steamer glides into view, with a backdrop that matches Leonowens’s description of a sky “aureoles with flaming hues of orange, fringed with amber and gold”.
Yet Sher invites us to look closely – when Anna unfurls a new map, showing how small Siam is, testing her pupils’ national pride, you empathise with their crestfallen reaction rather than rejoice at her know-how. Through the finest detail of performance – sometimes it’s just a look or a glance – there’s a continual sense of thought processes going on behind decorous façades.
Many of the songs remain transcendently lovely, chief among them I Whistle a Happy Tune, Hello, Young Lovers, Getting to Know You, and that invitation to madly polka Shall We Dance?. They are exquisitely sung by O’hara.
Beyond those classics, though, the second half opens with the (often excised) Western People Funny, in which the royal wives try to wear western hoop-skirts and giggle at the assumption that these contraptions signify cultural superiority. “They always try to turn us inside down and upside out!” they teasingly jeer of the British colonial tendency.
You could say the show is similarly discombobulating. Far easier to admire than to love, to ruminate on than swoon over? Yes, but – I think – that’s the point.