If you loiter on the Lincoln Center Plaza late most evenings, you can watch the audience dispersing from the latest revival of that mid-20th century modern masterpiece The King and I. And you can bet that plenty of them are whistling a happy tune.
Of course, there’s little to fear in any new staging the 1951 Rodgers and Hammerstein show, based on Anna Leonowens’s memoirs of working as a governess in the royal palace of Siam in the 1860s. And this one in particular seems a remarkably safe bet. The director Bartlett Sher is a Lincoln Center regular and this marks his fourth collaboration with Kelli O’Hara and her sunshine soprano. But Sher did take a regal risk in casting Ken Watanabe, a stately actor with a pronounced Japanese accent, as the King of Siam.
The show opens with a spry dash through the overture (the ace orchestra is led by Ted Sperling) and a stunning scenic coup de theatre. You spend a lot of the first act hoping designer Michael Yeargen will unfurl something equally nifty, but the rest of the scenes are set more minimally. And for a while, that applies to the emotive content, too.
Watanabe’s mien is saturnine. You can tell he wants to have fun with the role, but it takes him a long time to work up to it. O’Hara, sporting decorous gowns and an unfortunate wig, is in excellent and effortless voice. She has that rare capacity for making goodness seem interesting and so the character of Anna, warm and principled, fits her as closely as the graceful bodices Catherine Zuber supplies. (Zuber, who also designed the pastry-cream couture of Gigi, is having a splendid Broadway season.)
The King often speaks of favouring the scientific, but in many of Watanabe’s interactions with O’Hara, there’s a distinct lack of chemistry. This comes to seem intentional; the frost thaws gradually until it suddenly invites the rapturous blossoming of Shall We Dance. It’s a long time – perhaps too long – to wait for the reward, but when it comes, it’s glorious. Similarly songs that are pleasant enough in the first iteration – I Whistle a Happy Tune, Hello Young Lovers – gain grandly when reprised. The supporting roles are generally well acted and sung. Ashley Park is a poignant Tuptim, Ruthie Ann Miles a politic Lady Thiang, and the numberless children are especially darling.
If Sher has a fine sense of humour he keeps it well concealed. What jokes there are in the script fall flat and Western People Funny isn’t, nor is it especially scathing. This certainly isn’t a version that interrogates or alleviates the Orientalism of the original. And The Little House of Uncle Thomas is still very, very long. But the music is so entrancing, the lyrics so enchanting, the characterizations so rich, that it’s no puzzlement why The King and I endures.
