Hello Again, Young Lovers

The King and I at the Vivian Beaumont Theater

Kelli O'Hara and Ken Watanabe in The King and I.

            Director Bartlett Sher’s new staging of The King and I is the kind of production the enormity of which becomes clearer in retrospect.  Upon leaving the theater you will be dazzled.  On your way home you will be thoughtful.  The next morning you will be flabbergasted you could have witnessed something so well-conceived.

            Mr. Sher, also the director of 2008’s South Pacific at the same venue, establishes himself firmly with this King and I as the premier re-interpreter of classic musicals.  (He also helms this fall’s Fiddler on the Roof, thank God.)  He has an unmatchable knack for bringing out the big in the great scores and stories of the Golden Age, and he outdoes himself here.  The stage at the Beaumont Theater is vast, which dealt blows to lesser productions—Jack O’Brien’s 2013 Macbeth was dwarfed by it—but does nothing but good for The King and I.  The glorious sets, by Michael Yeargan evoking a landscape about as close to a real Asian palace as one can get outside of Bangkok, frame extraordinarily well-staged choreography by Christopher Gattelli.  No surprise that Mr. Yeargan and Mr. Gattelli are both veterans of Mr. Sher’s South Pacific.  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

            This is a beautiful production, plain and simple.  It is a unique and affecting work of art, made whole, as any King and I should be, by the right choice of King of Siam and, to a lesser extent, Anna (it’s a simpler part).  In casting these indelible parts Mr. Sher has wisely skewed toward the safe.  It is asking too much to imagine any better Anna Leonowens than Kelli O’Hara (another veteran of South Pacific), who has with this production proved herself definitively the best musical stage actress since Julie Andrews.  And it is plainly impossible to conceive of any man living who could play a better King of Siam than the Japanese actor Ken Watanabe.

            Mr. Watanabe and Ms. O’Hara are a match made in heaven.  They play off each other as if they’ve been working together for years (in fact, this is Mr. Watanabe’s first time treading the boards of an American stage, though it will not be the last).  Their chemistry is tangible, their shared comic ability honed, and—to put it bluntly—they are both too damned talented for words.  There is nothing to be said about the almost insane level of energy attained by this pairing during the now-legendary “Shall We Dance?” sequence except to say that you must—must—see it before you die.

            Ms. O’Hara is a singer and actress of astounding talent.  The stage practically glows gold wherever she steps.  But again, Anna, a British teacher who’s spent most of her life in the far East, is a safe part, dramatically rather simple and musically gifted with many of the better numbers in this stellar score (made even more affecting by Robert Russell Bennett's lustrous orchestrations, performed by a full orchestra).  Mr. Watanabe, at least Ms. O’Hara’s equal in pure dramatic ability, achieves something more important here—he reinvents the King of Siam, emblazoned into the collective memory of the theater by Yul Brynner in 4,625 stage performances and a 1956 film (for which he collectively won two Tonys and an Oscar).  Mr. Watanabe’s King is manic, excitable, and imperious, but somehow exceedingly human, and likeable, mostly because Mr. Watanabe is an actor of such phenomenal feeling that he leaves a bit of himself on the stage in every scene, and yet transforms himself totally, so that you never for a second consider that this fictional King is not a living, breathing man sharing his story with the world.  Thus the most appropriate emotion upon leaving the Beaumont is not any I initially listed, but disbelief.  We have never seen anything like this before.

            This production is not perfect—the lighting, by Donald Holder, is distractingly artificial, and at three hours, there are swaths of the show (most significantly the unnecessary ballet sequence, “The Small House of Uncle Thomas”) that could have been cut down to size.  But as far as musical theater goes, it’s pretty much the ideal.  Mr. Sher has created a magnificent self-contained world for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s characters to dance around in, and it’s a snow globe I’d gladly shake again to watch the beautiful little puzzle pieces fall into place.