Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s musical The King and I opened at the Lincoln Center Theater at The Vivian Beaumant in April, and by June, it had already won the Tony Award for the Best Revival of a Musical. The musical follows the story of Anna Leonowens, played by Kelli O’Hara, as she travels to Siam to be the schoolteacher for the children of the king (Hoon Lee). The effect that “Mrs. Anna,” as she is referred to by the Siamese, has on the kingdom, and the effect of the Siam royal court on her sweeps the audience away “on a bright cloud of music.”
In one of the most diverse songs of the night, Kelli O’Hara sings to the audience about the behaviors of the king and his loyal subjects. Mrs. Anna is drastically different from the Siamese with her hoop skirts, feminism, and fierce independence, and the lyrics comically portray her exasperation with the utter devotion the subjects show towards the King, as well as her frustration with the king himself. This is a timeless song, connecting with every generation of women and independent thinkers. Throughout the show, O’Hara has to display a full range of emotions, from ecstatic to nervous to excited to anguished, but this song is perhaps her most impressive display of the evening. Her mien while she sang was both captivating and hilarious, and portrayed her deservance of her Tony award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical.
Hoon Lee, who was last seen on Broadway in 2004 in a revival of Pacific Overtures, began playing the King of Siam on September 29. Lee balances O’Hara’s enlightened Englishwoman with his portrayal of a king struggling to achieve modernity while still maintaining himself in the traditional role as king. This goal was finally realized on the King’s deathbed, when he figuratively handed the crown to his son and watched the new king decree that the older, slavish devotion shown to the king was outdated, and that the people should now follow the English customs of monarchical respect. The King’s death on stage was chillingly real, and the audience felt both the pain of his death and the freedom of his passing.
Lee’s most outstanding display was towards the end of the show, when he and Mrs. Anna sang and danced to “Shall We Dance?” followed directly by him whipping a runaway slave. The lighthearted and romantic mood set during the most famous of songs from this musical was entirely jettisoned with the King’s rage at the slave’s audacity. Lee absolutely dominated in those scenes and displayed an incredible acting prowess with his ability to move so drastically from one emotion to a contrasting one.
Lady Thiang, the King’s principal wife, is usually played by Ruthie Ann Miles, but for this performance she was played by Ann Sanders. Sanders created a complexity and depth to Lady Thiang that is not immediately visible when she first meets Mrs. Anna and recites the beginning of Genesis to show off her knowledge of English. As the show progresses, it becomes clear through Sanders’s quiet, regal bearing that Lady Thiang is a calculating woman who knows how to manipulate people for the good of her country. The way she dominated, controlled, and threatened Tuptim (Ashley Park), the King of Siam’s courtesan gift from the king of Burma, was strikingly different from the poised and confident woman that Sanders otherwise portrayed.
The set designer, Michael Yeargan, brilliantly designed the set for the theater space. The Lincoln Center Theater at The Vivian Beaumont is planned differently than the standard theater. At this theater, the seats are set up in amphitheater style around a stage that juts out into the center of the room over the orchestra pit, extending from the standard stage in the front of the room. When the audience first enters the room, the orchestra pit is open, the stage is concealed by a beautifully textured curtain, and the walls decorated to look like the inside of a Siamese palace. Throughout the show, most of the acting took place in the front area of the stage, directly over the orchestra pit, and the back was used to create the illusion of grand rooms in a grand palace. The settings of the different rooms were created using large prop pieces that could easily be moved on and off the stage. The minimalist set, very popular in theater today, earned Yeargan a Tony Award nomination for Best Scenic Design.
Catherine Zuber, the costume designer, was also nominated for a Tony Award, albeit one that did win. The costumes in the show were absolutely outstanding, deftly intertwining mid-1800s British style with traditional Siamese clothes. The costumes served to enhance the struggle between the older, traditional world and the newer, more modern world.
The highlight of the night was the ballet that Tuptim wrote based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin which the palace dancers performed for the King’s British visitors. The ballet essentially adopted the plot of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel and placed it in Siamese terms. It was amusing to see how Tuptim misunderstood various things in the Western world as she translated it to terms she understood. The costumes, mass and makeup of the dancers highlighted the cultural differences. The ballet itself was remarkably modern in the way it treated the story line, using dancers, music, narration and a small chorus to propel the story forward.
Although the passage of time was sometimes challenging to follow, the performance was truly “Something Wonderful”. From the very beginning of the show with Mrs. Anna’s introduction to Siam all the way through the King’s death at the end, the audience laughed, clapped and wept along with the actors. The costumes and set took the play out of Lincoln Center in 2015 and placed it in Siam in the mid-1800s. The King and I fully deserved its four Tony Awards and nine nominations, and leaves the audience, to paraphrase Mrs. Anna, whistling a happy tune.