I grant it looks wonderful. Designer Brian Thomson has festooned the proscenium arch and boxes with golden elephants and bronze buddhas. The king himself occupies a throne-room like a tiered wedding-cake. And the royal wives and courtiers sport glittering, bejewelled head-dresses that resemble gleaming towers.
Christopher Renshaw's production is a feast for the eye, but cannot still one's doubts about Rodgers and Hammerstein's quaintly patronising musical.
Anna Leonowens famously goes to Siam as governess to the royal children. What strikes one in a post-colonial age, however, is the one-way intellectual traffic. Though she unbends to the king, she remains an imperialist emblem: there is no suggestion she might learn something of the Siamese way of life.
This production also suffers from a mismatch in casting: at times, I felt it should have been called not The King and I, but The Prince and the Showgirl. The king, Jason Scott Lee, has authority, poise, muscular calves and pectorals, and a good voice. What he lacks is years, so that his fathering of 77 children seems improbable and his climactic death comes as a bolt from the blue.
And while Elaine Paige has many virtues, including the ability to project a number, she is not exactly my idea of an upper class military widow. The point of the story is that a tough governess confronts a testy autocrat: Ms Paige is so full of cheery grins and showbiz charm that battle between the two is never really joined. The best performance, in fact, comes from Taewon Yi Kim who - as the king's head wife - almost stops the show with her melting rendering of Something Wonderful.
Otherwise one is left to admire the spectacle, a glittering oriental kaleidscope, and the dancing: the interlude in which the royal household presents a ballet retains its irrelevant panache in Susan Kikuchi's reworking of Jerome Robbins's choreography. And the moment when Anna and the king break into the famous polka, Shall We Dance, briefly lifts the spirits.
But it remains a curiously old-fashioned, operetta-like musical, of the kind Rodgers and Hammerstein were meant to have banished with Oklahoma! And behind it lurks the belief that the Siamese are either despots, slaves or naive children who need a good dose of British enlightenment.
Today the show is a political embarrassment that not even Richard Rodgers's seductive songs can redeem.
Booking to next year. Box office: 020-7494 5020. This review appeared in some editions yesterday
