Festooned with awards and five-star reviews, the Broadway production of the classic musical The King and I is coming to London for a 14-week run, before a tour that will take the show across Asia – but not to Thailand, formerly Siam, where the story of Victorian culture clash, colonialism and romance is set.
“I haven’t been told officially, but I understand they don’t necessarily approve,” producer Howard Panter saidof the show, in which the King of Siam employs an English teacher to educate his innumerable wives and children on western manners.
The two stars of the Broadway show, Kelli O’Hara, who won a Tony award for her portrayal of Anna, and the Japanese film and stage star Ken Watanabe, who was nominated for a Tony as the King, will both make their West End debut when the show opens at the London Palladium in late June.
“It’s been a dream of mine,” O’Hara said, explaining that she missed the transfer of South Pacific in 2011, by the same Lincoln Centre creative team under director Bartlett Sher, because she was about to give birth to her first child.
Watanabe – a star in Letters from Iwo Jima, and Oscar and Golden Globe nominated for The Sea of Trees and The Last Samurai, and whose reaction to the invitation to play the king was a deeply dubious “really??” – described London as “a holy place” for being the home of Shakespeare’s plays and the National Theatre.
The musical, one of the best loved of the 20th century, was based on the novel and film Anna and the King of Siam, loosely derived from the memoirs of a 19th-century governess, Anna Leonowens. When Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein turned it into a musical in 1951, Rex Harrison was first approached to play the king and then, even more startlingly, Noel Coward. The final casting was an almost unknown young actor, Yul Brynner, who went on to play the role in more than 2,000 performances.
This production, the first Broadway revival since 1996, ran for 16 months, won four Tony awards, and then went on a sell-out tour of the US with a restored line from the original Rodgers and Hammerstein script.
By then Donald Trump was in the White House, and Sher said the king’s consideration of how best to protect his enemy encircled country – “build a fence around Siam or should I let everyone in?” – all but stopped the show every night.
Sher praised the talent and confidence of the London cast of children, the youngest being six-year-old-Angelica Pearl Scott, from Harlow in Essex. “I think them being cute comes for free,” he said.
