THE NEW $5.5 MILLION Broadway revival of "The King and I," the 1951 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that Yul Brynner built a career on, lavishes enormous attention and money on constructing a sumptuous and remarkably authentic stage version of Thailand in the last century.
But the concentration on esthetic authenticity begs the question of whether the show, which opens on Thursday at the Neil Simon Theater and stars Donna Murphy and Lou Diamond Phillips, reflects a historical authenticity. The team of Australian designers involved has labored mightily to create the look of a Thailand that never existed.
The King and I," after all, is a romantic entertainment, much better known for its songs ("Shall We Dance""I Whistle a Happy Tune," "Getting to Know You") than for its story. The musical, which starred Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner, opened soon after World War II. Three years later, the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu would begin to pull the United States into what became the Vietnam quagmire. But at that time, Thailand was about as far from America, and about as exotic, as Oscar Hammerstein or anyone else could have imagined.
The original show (and the popular 1956 film version with Brynner and Deborah Kerr) employs a form of pan-Asianness that derives from a variety of sources: a generic restaurant in a shopping mall, say, with a bit of Japanese kabuki thrown in, along with white face to hide Western facial features and a peculiar, even eccentric vision of Buddhism.
The current version, based largely on a 1991 Australian production starring the English actress Hayley Mills, was first licensed by the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization and then embraced by it. This "King and I" seems to struggle hard to present a Thailand that a more sophisticated audience today would accept as truthful.
Indeed, the sets aim for the spectacular, with 2,000 square feet of gold leaf, majestic thrones and shimmering headdresses. The stage curtain -- six panels depicting traditional costumed dancers -- is flanked by the profiles of 30-foot elephants with gilt-edged trunks and jeweled eyes. Incense wafts from altars built over the box seats on either side of the stage, and before the curtain goes up, the audience can watch saffron-robed monks at prayer.
Brian Thomson, the set designer, has used the color deep burgundy to frame authentic Thai murals and designs taken from the Grand Palace in Bangkok, from old photographs and paintings, and even from a richly lacquered, elephant-legged coffee table that he bought in northern Thailand.
The costume designer, Roger Kirk, also an Australian, has used Thai materials and clothing, making sure that some of Anna's hoop-skirted dresses are of Thai silk and that the royal dancers (in numbers originally choreographed by Jerome Robbins, with added choreography by Lar Lubovitch) wear Thai sarongs and use Thai masks. Some of the "gold-bullion" embroidery and beadwork was done in India to keep down costs.
"For Australians, Thailand is next door," Mr. Kirk said. "So a cheap sarong won't wash." The glittering outfits that Mr. Phillips wears as the King are based on old photographs of the real monarch, as is the actor's haircut.
The striving for authenticity has also meant putting Asian faces in Asian roles. And even the accent of the actors as they speak English is as Thai-like as possible, with help from a dialect coach and a Thai waiter at a Bridgeport, Conn., restaurant named, implausibly, "The King and I." The waiter was found after an appeal on the Internet, said the show's director, Christopher Renshaw.
Dodger Productions, one of the producers, and Wendy's International, the hamburger chain, in its first association with a Broadway production, are helping to market the musical as family entertainment. But Mr. Renshaw and his Australian team are more subversive than that.
They are modernizing this musical, and not only through the lavishness of the sets, the vast computerized lighting system designed by the other Australian on the team, Nigel Levings, and the sheer busyness of 54 actors: they are seeking to stress the deeper, even darker themes of colonialism, slavery, feminism and cultural ambiguity that they believe are buried in the text.
"To do it just as an entertainment, that's been done before," declared Mr. Renshaw, an Englishman who said that he reveres Thailand. Living there for a time, he added, made him question some of his Western assumptions about what it is to be civilized, and ultimately it changed him profoundly.
"If you're doing a piece that is 40 years old," he said, "you have to come in with a viewpoint. If you take all this new understanding on board, it shifts emphasis and changes the show, so it's worth doing."
The show itself, however, is viewed with displeasure -- even banned, in fact -- in the relatively easygoing, unpuritanical Thailand, largely because it treats one of the country's most enlightened monarchs, King Mongkut, as a vaguely silly barbarian who is introduced to "civilization" (and the polka) by a Western governess. For many Thais, "The King and I" diminishes both the terror of a truly omnipotent monarchy and the importance of the complex culture that produced it.
The musical tells the story of Anna Leonowens, a supposedly Welsh-born woman who was said to have served as a governess to the children of the King of Siam, as Thailand was known, in the 1860's.
The show's script, however, is based on a 1943 best-selling novel, "Anna and the King of Siam," by Margaret Landon, which itself was loosely based on Anna Leonowens's two books, "The English Governess at the Siamese Court" (1870) and "The Romance of the Harem" (1873). Both are full of historical errors, beginning with the title of governess, since the King's diaries make clear that Anna was hired only as a teacher of English.
William Warren, a longtime American scholar of Thailand, said Anna's worst errors were in the second book, when her need to publish began to outrun her experiences. She asserts that the King threw wives who displeased him into dungeons and that he ordered the public torture and burning of a consort and the monk with whom she had fallen in love, an incident that Anna claims to have witnessed and which serves as the model for the Tuptim episode in the musical.
BUT BANGKOK'S WATERY soil could support no dungeons or even basements, nor, Mr. Warren notes, is there mention of a public burning in domestic or foreign accounts of the time. As one of the king's biographers, Alexander Griswold wrote about Anna, "Virtue was not unknown in Siam before her arrival, and a cool assessment suggests that she did not loom very large in the life of King Mongkut or his children."
Anna's version of her own life was just that: a version. She was not born in Wales and brought up in a middle-class English family; she was born Ann Edwards and brought up in India. Her father was not a high-ranking British officer but a soldier who died before her birth. She grew up in an army barracks, where blankets served as walls to separate families and her mother found another man. Anna's own husband, Thomas Leon Owens, was a clerk in the army pay office at Poona. When he died, she was left with two children to support. She altered her name to the more exotic Leonowens and taught in the British community of Singapore before hearing of -- and landing -- a job as teacher to the many children (and many wives) of King Mongkut.
The musical, then, is a confection built on a novel built on a fabrication. It is an outpouring of American innocence, like so much of Rodgers and Hammerstein, suggesting that a pure American liberalism will lead, if not always to happy endings, then to a better civilization than the barbarity of the past.
American influence on Southeast Asia was apparent soon enough, and to their credit, Rodgers and Hammerstein, for all the conventional fantasies of "The King and I," toy with some of the paradoxes. Even Anna starts to understand that her effect is helping to destroy the king she loves, let alone Tuptim, the Burmese slave she teaches. And as she tries to bring Western "enlightenment" to Siam, while protecting it from British colonialism, she begins to sense the strain and damage she has caused.
"We blunder into cultures other than our own and we do such terrible damage," Mr. Renshaw said of Anna. But did she ever feel that way? "I don't think she ever felt it," he said slowly. "But it's in the text; there's more in it than they wrote." Similarly, he said, King Mongkut seems to understand in the script that he must modernize Siam if it is to survive and escape colonialism, "but he knows that change will be tainted and destroy him."
The oddest part of the musical is the bizarre ballet "The Small House of Uncle Thomas," enacted for the King and his British guests. It is the story of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," narrated by the slave Tuptim, which Anna suggests to show the British how civilized Siam really is. Under Anna's influence and teaching, Tuptim turns it into a parable about her own subjugation and that of the King's other women.
In America, at roughly the same historical moment, there was a civil war about slavery of a far harsher kind than the servitude then practiced in Thailand. Rodgers and Hammerstein seem, at least, to be warning their audiences not to be too smug in their attitudes toward this "barbarian" king.
THEODORE S. CHAPIN, president of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, which licenses 2,500 R&H productions annually, said, "In any given year, every producer in Australia asks us about 'The King and I.' " But Richard Rodgers's daughter, Mary Rodgers Guettel, was especially taken with this Australian production and its sets and thought it would do well on Broadway.
Five years later, with more money and two actors who are under contract for a year, Mr. Renshaw and his team believe they can pull off their real vision of the play.
"We've given them lots of leeway," Mr. Chapin said, from using lines about Abraham Lincoln in early rehearsal scripts to lots of "soundscape" -- music, much of it Thai -- to carry the action and make the show more like a film. "You can add music," Mr. Chapin recalled telling Mr. Renshaw, " 'but remember, there's a polka in this score.' "
He paused, and added with a hint of irony: "I don't think they've pulled it too far toward authenticity to keep it from being an American musical."
Before King Mongkut becomes too romanticized through revisionism, however, it should be noted that he did speak a remarkably embellished and florid English and had added to the Grand Palace a clock tower modeled after Big Ben in London. According to Mr. Warren, the king also provided his favorite artists with scenic photographs sent to him by President Franklin Pierce. The result was some startling glimpses of Mount Vernon and Monticello in traditional murals on the walls of one temple, Wat Bovorn-nives.
And it was King Chulalongkorn, Mongkut's son (whom Anna most influences in the show), who traveled widely and built the Throne Hall, a strange Italianate structure that still stands in the Grand Palace complex, with its Thai-style roofs instead of the planned domes.
"I would hope," said Mr. Thomson, the set designer, "that in this production the story comes across that it isn't the Thais who are the strangers, but Anna herself; that Anna, being a woman of that period, needing to wear those garments and needing to have those beliefs, is the real stranger in that court."