Playwright: music by Richard Rodgers, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II
At: Drury Lane Theatre, 100 Drury Lane in Oak Brook Terrace
Phone: 630-530-0111; $22-$41.50
Runs through: March 4
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
In a way, The King And I was rather progressive for its time: Previous to its premiere in 1951, Asians were rare onstage, their roles largely confined to villains, clowns and decor. Oscar Hammerstein’s third-generation adaptation of Anna Leonowens’ 1862 memoirs proposed a leading man of color—specifically, Asian Pacific—who forges an interracial relationship with an Englishwoman (platonic, of course) and dies at the play’s conclusion.
Nowadays, however, The King And I is a social embarrassment in far bigger ways: Conceived as a star vehicle for Gertrude Lawrence, the dynamic between the forthright schoolmistress and the proud monarch seeking to give his children a European education is structured on the domestic-farce paradigm of the clever wife vs. the gullible husband (very popular in post-WWII America). Richard Rodgers’ eminently hummable score makes no attempt to mimic indigenous instrumentation beyond a few taps on a woodblock or finger-cymbals. And then there’s the diminished acceptability of tarting up Anglo actors in horsehair wigs and Max Factor ‘oriental.’ Where, oh, where is a theatre company supposed to find singing and dancing Asians?
Drury Lane Director William Osetek has found one superlative representative of that demographic in Joseph Anthony Foronda, a veteran with the expected contemporary credits—Miss Saigon, Pacific Overtures, et al.—and a few unexpected, too. (He played a French gallery owner in the Chicago Shakespeare production of Sunday in The Park With George—Hey! Genghis Khan’s troops left no descendants?) In the role of Siam’s King Mongkut, he makes the story his own, with Anna—played by Mary Ernster with reliable pretty-as-a-plate-of-toffee charm—a formidable foil, but a foil, nevertheless. Jerome Robbins’ original choreography is reproduced in full, but Rachel Rockwell appears to have researched the conventions of Pacific Islander theatre, reducing the potential drollery of its 19th-century subjects’ observations on the contradictions of Victorian decorum. (All countries’ governmental foreign policies are conveniently overlooked.)
Despite valiant efforts to counteract the text’s frivolous elements, however, The King and I is unlikely to be anything but a museum piece to future generations. In the meantime, Drury Lane Oakbrook has assembled as stellar a rainbow-coalition cast as could be wished for here and now. And in an age of put-it-all-out-there sexual expression, the Shall We Dance? number continues to be the most romantic scene in the history of the American musical theatre. See it while you can.