Review: ‘The King and I,’ Back on Broadway

A big, scrupulously detailed 19th-century ship glides toward the audience in the opening moments of Bartlett Sher’s resplendent production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I,” which opened on Thursday night at the Vivian Beaumont Theater. It’s an impressive sight, worthy of every “oooh” it elicits. But its presence wouldn’t count for nearly as much if it weren’t carrying such precious cargo.

That’s the determined, hopeful, anxious woman in a hoop skirt who runs onto the deck, toward the ship’s prow, and into our field of vision as if in cinematic close-up. Her name is Anna Leonowens, and she is played, you lucky theatergoers, by Kelli O’Hara.

One look at her face, agleam with intelligence and apprehension, and you suspect you’re in the hands of a guide you can trust. Then she starts to sing. And even if the familiar song she delivers (“I Whistle a Happy Tune”) usually makes you cringe, your confidence in her — and the Lincoln Center Theater production in which she appears — starts to soar. It will stay contentedly aloft for the next 2 hours and 50 minutes.

As you probably already know, Mrs. Leonowens’s task in this 1951 musical is to educate a passel of royal Siamese pupils in the ways of the West. The job of Ms. O’Hara — and that of Mr. Sher and Ken Watanabe, the commanding Japanese film star who portrays the King of Siam — is to educate 21st-century audiences in the enduring and affecting power of a colonialist-minded musical that, by rights, should probably embarrass us in the age of political correctness.

The last time “The King and I” was revived on Broadway — in a 1996 production directed by Christopher Renshaw, with Donna Murphy as Anna — it definitely wasn’t the show your grandmother loved. A dark strain of sadomasochistic tension born of Victorian repression and Eastern sensuality was introduced into sunny Siam that helped Ms. Murphy to a Tony Award and became the basis for a fabulous “Forbidden Broadway” parody.

As he demonstrated with his glorious “South Pacific” in 2008, also a Lincoln Center Theater production that starred Ms. O’Hara, Mr. Sher is no strong-armed revisionist. He works from within vintage material, coaxing shadowy emotional depths to churn up a surface that might otherwise seem shiny and slick.

If Mr. Sher’s “The King and I” isn’t quite the revelation that his “South Pacific” was, it’s because he’s mining material that has fewer secrets to yield. Tamper too much with the basic appeal of this show — captured in a startlingly self-aware lyric (in the song “Western People Funny”) that describes the British as feeling “so sentimental about the Oriental” — and it capsizes.

Mr. Sher neither apologizes for nor condemns such sentimentality. Instead, he sheds a light that isn’t harsh or misty but clarifying. He understands very well what makes the show work, and he delivers it clean-scrubbed and naked, allowing us to see “The King and I” plain.

By naked, I don’t mean minimal. More than any of the great golden-age musicals, for which Rodgers and Hammerstein forged the template with “Oklahoma!,” “The King and I” revels in spectacle. But its most impressive achievement is how it balances epic sweep with intimate sensibility.

Dressed to the tens by Michael Yeargan (sets) and Catherine Zuber (costumes), the show is both panoramic and personal, balancing dazzling musical set pieces with sung introspective soliloquies. That opening scene, with the deceptively little woman on the big boat, makes a promise it keeps — that macro and micro points of view will be equally honored.

The plot, in brief: Anna, a genteel Welsh army widow, comes to Siam with her young son, Louis (a winningly unforced Jake Lucas), to teach the many children of that country’s many-wived King. Cultural clashes ensue between the autocratic King and the proto-feminist Anna, but a mutual admiration — and attraction — develops as well. This leads to plot turns both tragic and comic.

It also involves a very, very large supporting cast, expertly marshaled by Mr. Sher and his choreographer, Christopher Gattelli (working from Jerome Robbins’s original watershed dances). If nothing else, this “King and I” is an exemplary lesson in crowd control, starting with the photorealist first act scene in which Anna and Louis make their way through the dockside throngs.

But what’s most remarkable is the degree to which every member of these crowds is an individual, defined by different and specific responses to what’s happening. This of course includes the characters we are meant to focus on, like the King’s eldest son, Prince Chulalongkorn (an excellent Jon Viktor Corpuz), or the clandestine lovers, Tuptim and Lun Tha (a tenderly matched Ashley Park and Conrad Ricamora).

When the King’s many progeny file onstage in “The March of the Siamese Children,” you look not only at the charming kids, each with his or her telling quirk, but also at their nervous respective mothers. Even in the show’s fabled ballet, a Siamese retelling of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” you’re conscious of the effect it is having on those watching and those participating in it.

This extra awareness doesn’t distract from the dance, which is rendered with breathtaking beauty; it enhances its emotional weight. No one is merely a dancer or an extra or an archetype, which may be the greatest defense this show offers against what can come across as cute condescension toward the exotic East.

Besides, what makes “The King and I” a five-handkerchief masterpiece isn’t its quaint portrait of mores at odds, but its portrayal of the varied forms and content of love, an abiding theme of Rodgers and Hammerstein. This score, given the full velvet touch by a sublime orchestra, contains some of their lushest ballads.

They acquire freshening nuance and anchoring conviction here. That Ms. O’Hara, one of our greatest reinterpreters of musical standards, does so is not surprising. (You’ll feel you’re hearing “Hello, Young Lovers” for the first time.) But also give full marks to the first-rate Ruthie Ann Miles (the original Imelda Marcos in “Here Lies Love”) who, as the King’s chief wife, turns “Something Wonderful” into an exquisite expression of romantic realism that could be the show’s anthem.

The person she’s singing about with such fond ambivalence (“This is a man who thinks with his heart/His heart is not always wise”) is the King himself, embodied here by Mr. Watanabe with the convincing exasperation of a majesty under siege. His diction is not always coherent, which makes him more of an underdog than usual in his standoffs with Anna. And his big solos, while attacked with ardor, should become even stronger as his pronunciation improves.

But he sure comes across when it really counts. “Shall We Dance?,” the number in which Anna teaches the King to trip the light, begins as a whimsical comic exercise. Then at a certain point, Mr. Watanabe’s eyes narrow, his voice deepens and he firmly clasps his co-star’s waist. Sex has entered the building.

Anna is only slightly startled by the arrival of genuine eroticism. As played by Ms. O’Hara, she’s a smart, scrappy, willful pragmatist who also happens to know that love is often as strange as it is undeniable. That knowledge infuses every note Ms. O’Hara sings, and it is something wonderful indeed.