Searching for modern relevance in ‘The King and I’
For a story about a white colonialist in Asia who swoons at the sight of a shirtless man who owns sex slaves, the latest rendition of “The King and I” sure feels inoffensive.
Chalk it up to director Bartlett Sher’s faithful stance on Oscar Hammersteins’ book and imaginative, knowing take on Richard Rodgers’ music.
In this revival, originally on Broadway in 2015 and now at the Hobby Center through Sunday, we hear two or three unforgettable songs (like the wittily self-conscious “Western People Funny”) and several duds (“I Whistle a Happy Tune,” also known as “Put on a Happy Face,” also known as “this is why some people despise musicals”) wrapped in a trite story that perhaps was daring in the 1950s for its implication of interracial romance but today whiffs of fake Orientalism.
The end result isn’t explosive modern-day social relevance — besides, I suppose, that moment when the King considered building a fence around Siam, and the audience chuckled — nor its equally combustible counterpart, outrage. The musical doesn’t make you passionate about its themes either way, even if its titular relationship is born of subtlety and contradiction. It’s satisfied, instead, to present craft alone, offering nothing more than a casual sense of contentment.
“The King and I” is about a widowed British colonialist, Anna, who arrives at the Siamese monarchy to teach the King’s many children, and the clash of wits, ego, culture, gender and flirtation that follows. It embodies the same paradox you get whenever you plop smart, conscious artists like Sher, and stars Jose Llana, who plays the King of Siam, and Laura Michelle Kelly, who plays Anna, into a world of pat moralities and quaint ideals — a piece of theater that attempts to critique the artistic and social shortcomings of its history but ends up simply symbolizing them.
Llana is loose, funny and charismatic as the fiery counterpoint to Kelly’s buttoned-up grace and precision. But they are still playing out old-fashioned pathologies that deserve more reckoning than a harsh scold or a heart attack.
Sure, that moment in “Shall We Dance?” has lost none of its potency, when the King grabs Anna’s waist, then glares with nervous machismo into her eyes, and she for the first time allows her pride to surrender to his magnetism. In that scene, the King could be all men and all the East, and she all women and all the West, each tempted by each other yet unwilling to submit because to do so would be to give up who they are. That glance carries in it a universe of the unspoken. It embodies the notion that a feminist’s desire for masculinity and an anti-colonialist’s desire for the West are both fatal wishes.
But what “Shall We Dance?” says about Anna and the King has more to do with lost potential — really, the whole musical could have felt as sweeping as this — rather than climaxes. Hammerstein wrote his way around sexual taboos of his time best he could, making their romance an open secret and therefore all the more irresistible. If only that Llana and Kelly rose to that level of subversion more often.
To be fair, the musical relishes individual songs and performances over any grand, unifying arc. Joan Almedilla, as Lady Thiang, sings a stellar “Something Wonderful” that’s supposed to be for Anna but really is about her own complicated feelings for her dominating husband. Manna Nichols and Kavin Panmeechao sparkle as the ill-fated lovers Tuptim and Lun Tha, the closest the musical gets to likable characters (though we see, with Anna and the King, that unsympathetic can also be compelling).
And, despite some minor technical hiccups opening night, the production is a marvel.
Michael Yeargan’s set proclaims its presence with lavish colors and flowing silk curtains. In the opening, a ship looms high against the painterly backdrop of the tropic sun’s orange glow, shimmering above the silhouette of mountains and greenery. This place isn’t modern-day Thailand. It’s an artistic approximation for the idea of the exotic.
That ship starts off small — a trick of the eye when watching a stage dead-on — then expands into a behemoth as it glides, surprisingly, toward the audience. Another giant is the obtrusive gray wall of the Siamese palace that produces a feeling of lavish claustrophobia that, late in the second act, rises up, revealing nothing but white light.
What a tasteful nod to the King’s inner battle between isolationism and Western assimilation. In one stroke of set movement, the perceived space onstage expands into an undefined and therefore seemingly infinite space, a well-timed encapsulation of uncharted territory.
And Sher’s “The King and I” must be praised for not trafficking in yellowface. It could have easily — and through the years it has been a repeat offender. And this production does not, which is notable, sadly.
If nothing else is modern about the piece, then casting certainly is, as is the rare presence of Llana as an Asian male sex symbol, not to mention the predominantly Asian cast. The best argument for this musical ends up adjacent to the art: that, if nothing else, this is an important career vehicle for Asian-American artists.
Is that enough to justify its existence? “The King and I” was a neat, perhaps even progressive musical in the 1950s that today reads as an existential crisis, a battle of old and new sensibilities.
Revivals can be hard arguments to make. Yet somehow they’ve done it. Llana’s hand on Kelly’s waist and the unsaid emotions that scene evokes means “The King and I,” ultimately, could escape oblivion. With Sher’s impressively respectful rendition as its latest prize, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s lyrical sojourn to Southeast Asia may continue to see the light of day. But the musical, with its old-fashioned East-meets-West sensibility, will have to hold onto each revival’s achievements with a firm grasp, like a corpse clutching a defibrillator, resisting irrelevance, despite everything.
Outdated themes put musical revival out of step