Tony winner Bartlett Sher (South Pacific) directs this classic tale of a British schoolteacher's unexpected relationship with the imperious King of Siam.
Five-time Tony Award nominee Kelli O'Hara (The Light in the Piazza, South Pacific) and Academy Award nominee Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai, Inception) star in a magnificent new Broadway production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's beloved THE KING AND I.
Featuring a cast of more than 50, choreography based on the original by Jerome Robbins, and a score of treasured songs including "Getting to Know You," "I Whistle a Happy Tune" and "Shall We Dance?" in their glorious, original orchestrations, Lincoln Center Theater's new staging of THE KING AND I invites you to get to know this inspiring and enchanting musical classic.
If this production has put the romantic passion of the tale on a bit of simmer, it has boosted the overall theme of intersocietal behavior and respect. 'Getting to Know You', for example, has never seemed more relevant to the score. In this production, it's not a mere classroom charm-song one-off, but an outward reflection of the uneasy feelings the characters are struggling with in that moment...The gender politics involving Anna, Lady Thiang and Tuptim also feel deeply resonant here. Without hammering away at the point too impulsively, Sher's intents seem to sway the story back to a uniquely feminist state of mind...Watanabe is a charismatic and relatively subdued King, but often very hard to decipher; his big number 'A Puzzlement' ends up being just that. Strangely though, the latter's surface debit sometimes works to some advantage--after all, the King is a man struggling with the ability to fully connect to others. O'Hara could bring out the romantic swoon in just about any male costar, and Anna is another triumph in her winsome recent gallery of fine portrayals. (And hearing her luscious soprano on beauties like 'Hello, Young Lovers' is like finding a precious gift inside a jewel box.)
The mutual fascination and eternal struggle for understanding across the cultural divide between East and West is played out on a magnificent scale in Lincoln Center Theater's breathtaking revival of The King and I. As he did with the company's transcendent South Pacific seven years ago, director Bartlett Sher banishes even the faintest trace of mid-century quaintness or patronizing exoticism from the material, treating the 1951 Rodgers & Hammerstein classic with unimpeachable dramatic integrity and emotional authenticity that are equaled by this landmark production's exquisite musicianship and vocals. As for the superlative leads, Kelli O'Hara and Ken Watanabe, to say they are outstanding seems almost unfair given the uniform excellence of the massive ensemble.
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