‘Stories of the east have seldom reached the western stage with any semblance of reality,” Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote shortly before the premiere of The King and I in 1951. Or, as one of the musical’s Siamese characters sings of westerners, “they feel so sentimental / about the oriental.”
Like so many mid-century classics, The King and I is problematic. If you were treating this story today, you probably wouldn’t centre a white British woman speaking loudly and bossily to foreigners until they thank her. Rodgers and Hammerstein show Anna Leonowens arriving in Siam to tutor the royal children, clashing repeatedly with the autocratic King Mongkut, yet becoming integral to his household and modernising project as he fends off predatory western powers.
Bartlett Sher’s handsome if reverent Broadway production, designed and lit in glowing gem tones, has already played in the West End and on tour. It’s no bold rethinking like Daniel Fish’s transformed Oklahoma! The operetta-like numbers are unassailably winning, and Sher’s sharpest insight is how that glorious music is piqued by worry. Songs in the shadow of power can’t escape an extra frisson of fear.
Helen George’s Anna is first seen gnawing an apprehensive lip. In I Whistle a Happy Tune, her eyes are perfectly round with feigned assurance, but she is soon crisply speaking truth to power. Arriving at court in a billow of aquamarine (sumptuous costumes by Catherine Zuber), she meets a selection of the king’s 67 children who respond eagerly to her idiosyncratic teaching – a brisk description of snow and some rousing show tunes (we await the Ofsted report).
The show is gingerly feminist: women are its smartest cookies and moral compass, and get the best tunes. Cezarah Bonner as the king’s first wife is a shrewd guide to palace politics, perplexity rippling beneath her poise. As the newest wife, Tuptim, Marienella Phillips shares fragile songs of love with her tender-voiced lover (Dean John-Wilson). Even the chorus of royal wives is a band of mothers, working around their touchy fella.
As well as entitled pique, a leonine Darren Lee finds flecks of mischief in Mongkut. Although the musical swims with tender melody, there’s a not-quite romance at its heart. Anna and the king can often barely abide, let alone fancy, each other. They hint at a deeper attraction when Anna demonstrates the polka in Shall We Dance? His hand slides around her waist, and the atmosphere shifts, if only while they spin across the floor. They can never be together – “I don’t like polygamy,” Anna declares, “or even moderate bigamy” – but for a tremulous instant you imagine a world in which they might.
It’s a vibrant moment in Sher’s staid production, which takes the heavy-handed dialogue at a ponderous pace. Most dynamic, based on the original choreography by Jerome Robbins, is a dramatic ballet version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, built from graphic, flexible body shapes. The dancers’ fearful fingers quiver in the air, a reminder that this tale is a reckoning with the uses of power, then and now.
• At the Dominion theatre, London, until 2 March.
