The King and I

by Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II

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The Themes of Subservience in the Play

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Over the years, many reviewers of Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical The King and I have complained about the ending of the musical, in which the king dies. Critics have called his deathbed scene too solemn and melodramatic—simply not in keeping with the musical comedy tone of the rest of the play. What these reviewers fail to recognize is that The King and I is not simply a "love" story between people of different cultures; the story is actually an analogy for a political relationship between their two countries. It is this political analogy underlying the relationship between Anna and the Oriental King that gives weight to the death scene (which Hammerstein added to the narrative when he adapted the story from Margaret Landon's Anna and the King of Siam). The deathbed scene resolves both of the central conflicts in the play—both the one between Anna and the King and the larger national conflict. The King's death resolves the first issue by removing the potential of an interracial union; it resolves the second by removing the King's backward politics from Siam's foreign policy, allowing his more modern—and anglicized—son to rule the country with better diplomacy.

The conflict between Anna and the King resides in the hierarchy of their relationship—who will rule, who will decide, and whose influence will predominate the lives of the King's children and his subjects. The conflict between Great Britain and Siam is essentially the same. The presence of the British Ambassador in the plot attests to the economic and political context within which the schoolteacher and the King both operate. The British Ambassador may report the rumor that the King is a barbarian, precipitating the Queen's decision to make Siam a protectorate. Thus the political analogy of the variation of boy-meets-girl plot in The King and I is the ascension of unofficial British domination over Siam (later known as Thailand), a domination that will transform the economic, political, and ideological Siamese culture. By the same token, Anna's presence will transform the King's children, and ultimately his kingdom, in a similar manner. Great Britain's relationship with Siam was not destined to be an official political colonization such as the kind achieved in Malayasia, Burma, Africa, and Hong Kong; in Siam, Great Britain pursued more of an unofficial alliance. Just as the courting between Anna and the King results in a kind of marriage (one that affords Anna some of the privileges of being a King's wife), Britain's courting of Siam ended not with an official colonization but with an agreement that gave Great Britain trade advantages with Siam.

The British actively sought trade advantages in Oriental nations, but this self-serving aspect of their interest was conveniently subsumed under the more commendable label of colonial development. It was in the interest of cultural development that Anna embarked on her program to educate and Westernize the royal children. To the British, the Siamese— as well as Africans, Indians, and Arabs—desperately needed exposure to Western religion, economic practices, and culture; and it just so happened that the British economy could use Siamese goods and services as well. Great Britain undertook the monumental task of civilizing "Oriental" nations and, in the process, wove their economies into these countries.

To accomplish this act of cultural dominance required an attitude of superiority over Oriental peoples-in much the same manner that men were once thought to be superior to women. Social Darwinism was invoked to explain why the Asians (an other non-whites) had not advanced as far as Western nations, and the word "oriental" came to be associated with backwardness and moral corruption, thus justifying...

(This entire section contains 1847 words.)

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the British program of anglicizing Oriental people. The "Orientalism" of Asian countries consisted of the imposition of a negative stereotype (immoral, inferior, and backward) that filtered actual observations. It is a form of racism that persisted for many centuries and still has residual effect on modern Western/Asian relations. In her bookThe English Governess at the Siamese Court: Being Recollections of Six Years in the Royal Palace at Bangkok, the original Anna Leonowens tells of falling prey to cultural bias toward Orientals. She describes the Siamese people as "apt to be indolent, improvident, greedy, intemperate, servile, cruel, vain, inquisitive, superstitious, and cowardly." Her terms coincide with the accepted sentiment that Orientals were morally inferior, child-like people whose culture would not progress without the intervention of their Western neighbors. As Edward Said commented on this relationship in Orientalism:"Orientals were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen though, analyzed not as citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved or confined or...taken over." Sometimes the takeover was overt, as it was in India in the eighteenth century, when Great Britain replaced the fragmenting political structures in Bengal and elsewhere with its own governors. But in Siam, as well as in some other Asian countries, the defeat of the sovereign body was accomplished from within—through education.

The King of Siam himself (the real King Mongkut as well as the Hammerstein character) played into the British imperialist hand and conveniently asked for Ms. Leonowens's teaching services. The King had already been brainwashed to value Western culture over his own. He viewed his world as substandard, in need of an infusion of Western culture that could be introduced through the education of his children. Unfortunately, he himself was unable to make the leap to the "scientific" and "modern" Western stereotype. He sings a song in which he expresses his doubts and insecurities; he finds leading his people "A Puzzlement," and the implication is that Anna can help him to sort out his confusion. Lady Thiang corroborates this view of the King, singing about his limitations and his many dreams that will never unfold, adding the faint praise that "at least he tries." His inability to suit the values of the new society he himself wants to impose upon his kingdom necessitates his death, to make room for young Prince Chulalongkorn to complete the transformation of Siam from a "backward" country to a modern one.

In the analogy between the human relationship and the political one, the courtship and ritual marriage (in which the King gives Anna a ring and demands that she place it on her finger) corresponds to the courtship and unofficial alliance between Great Britain and Siam. The King invites Anna to his palace, hoping to benefit from her teaching while controlling her as a "servant." On a political level, he invites Great Britain to create an economical presence in Bangkok, while hoping to prevent the British from taking over the country. But the King cedes more than he plans to in both arenas. He refuses at first to give Anna the house she bargained for, but eventually he gives in and offers to build her one that adjoins the palace. Granting her the right to own property and build a proper English home is equivalent to offering her the right to colonize, and she jumps at the chance. On the political level, the King's first reaction to the threat of being made a protectorate is to send the British Ambassador packing, but Anna convinces him to put on a show of Westernization instead. Just as the show of "whistling a happy tune" ends up restoring confidence to Anna and her son, preparing for a display of Western culture has the ultimate effect of actually Westernizing the King's palace. In the process of sewing European dresses and learning to use European eating implements, the King's court is transformed into a quasi-European court, displaying many of the earmarks of British civilization. This is precisely where Great Britain wants Siam—eager to adopt to Western customs.

Giving Anna a home and adopting Western customs for an evening represents the King's hand in the colonizing of his culture. The Kralahome sees the imminence of assimilation more clearly than does the King, and he fears it. On two occasions he warns Anna not to "ruin" the King or the Prince with her Western ideas, but he soon he realizes his own impotence in resisting her. The Kralahome represents a throwback to old Siamese culture. His role in the new Siam is left undefined at the play's end. He has tried to arrest the inevitable union between the King and Anna and between Great Britain and Siam, but he has failed.

There are several moments in the play that reinforce the symbolism of a ritual marriage between the King and Anna. Her elaborate preparations for the entertainment of the British Ambassador place her in the role of "first lady" of the house—ordering the King's wives about, deciding on decor, going into dinner on his arm, and engineering the conversation to display his scholarship. These are the tasks of the wife, and she reaps her rewards after the guests have departed in an intimate dance with the King and in the gift of a ring. To further underscore her status, Lady Thiang on two occasions begs Anna to go to the King, at one point telling her that she herself cannot meet the King's "special needs," that only Anna can. Lady Thiang, the King's number one wife, also releases her son to Anna's teaching, recognizing that Anna can provide the young man with instruction that she cannot.

The King's death scene is unusual in that the focus rests not on the dying King but on Anna's decision to stay in Siam. The children certainly show more interest in that outcome than in the death of their imperious father. Anna stands at center stage during most of this scene, with the King dying on a divan on one side and Prince Chulalongkorn addressing the wives and other children on the other. Besides Anna's decision, the other business to be accomplished here is the transfer of power from the King to the prince. This is duly accomplished and then the final conflict of the play is happily resolved—the Prince's second proclamation proves that Anna's teachings have taken hold, for he proclaims that no longer will his subjects have to bow in the lowly position of a toad but will stand erect and look him in the eye with confidence. He will be a King who values his subjects as people. The Prince has shown his mettle in Anna's classroom—challenging her authority at times but also displaying an appreciation for pragmatism and the demands that the modern world will make of him. At the time of his ascension to the throne, he is still a child—still in need of a governess, and still malleable. Anna's decision to stay assures that the young prince will complete his Westernization and, more importantly, not forsake his humanity in a quest for power. In addition to fulfilling this political task, Anna's continued presence will also serve the personal relationship she had with the King; she will continue to be a loving, guiding force in the children's lives.

Source: Carole L. Hamilton, in an essay for Drama for Students. Gale 1997.
Hamilton is an instructor at Cary Academy.

A Confection Built on a Novel Built on a Fabrication

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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 l, after all, is aromantic 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 l. 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 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 Rodger'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. Thompson, 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."

Source: Steven Erlanger, "A Confection Built on a Novel Built on a Fabrication," in the New York Times, April 7, 1996, pp. 4, 23.

Review of The King and I

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Nearly two years having elapsed since they invaded the South Pacific, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II have moved over to the Gulf of Siam. The King and I, which opened at the St. James last evening, is their musical rendering of Margaret Landon's Anna and the King of Siam. As a matter of record, it must be reported that The King and I is no match for South Pacific, which is an inspired musical drama.

But there is plenty of room for memorable music-making in the more familiar categories. Strictly on its own terms, The King and I is an original and beautiful excursion into the rich splendors of the Far East, done with impeccable taste by two artists and brought to life with a warm, romantic score, idiomatic lyrics, and some exquisite dancing.

As the English governess who comes out from England in the Eighteen-Sixties to teach the King's children, Gertrude Lawrence looks particularly ravishing in some gorgeous costumes and acts an imposing part with spirit and an edge of mischief. Yul Brynner plays the King with a kind of fierce austerity, drawn between pride of office and eagerness to learn about the truth of the modern world from a"scientific foreigner." Apart from the pleasures of the musical theater, there is a theme in The King and I, and, as usual, Mr. Rodgers and Mr. Hammerstein have developed it with tenderness as well as relish, and with respect for the human beings involved.

Part of the delight of their fable derives from the wealth of beauty in the Siamese setting; and here Jo Mielziner, the Broadway magnifico, has drawn on the riches of the East; and Irene Sharaff has designed some of her most wonderful costumes. As a spectacle, The King and I is a distinguished work. In the direction, John van Druten has made something fine and touching in the elaborate scene that introduces the King's charming children to their English school marm. Jerome Robbins, serving as choreographer, has put together a stunning ballet that seasons the liquid formalism of Eastern dancing with some American humor. Yuriko, the ballerina, is superb as the Siamese notion of Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Mr. Rodgers is in one of his most affable moods. For Miss Lawrence he has written several pleasant and ingratiating numbers which she sings brightly—"Hello, Young Lovers!" "The Royal Bangkok Academy" and "Shall I Tell You What I Think of You?" Dorothy Sarnoff does something wonderful with "Something Wonderful," which is one of Mr. Rodgers' most exultant numbers. Probably the most glorious number is "I Have Dreamed,'' which Doretta Morrow and Larry Douglas sing as a fervent duet. Mr. Brynner is no great shakes as a singer, but he makes his way safely through a couple of meditative songs written with an agreeable suggestion of Eastern music.

Say a word of thanks to Russell Bennett for his colorful orchestrations that make a fresh use of individual instruments and that always sound not only interesting but civilized. His orchestration should be especially appreciated in the long and enchanting scene that brings on the children one by one.

Don't expect another South Pacific nor an Oklahoma!. This time Mr. Rodgers and Mr. Hammerstein are not breaking any fresh trails. But they are accomplished artists of song and words in the theatre; and King and I is a beautiful and lovable musical play.

Source: Brooks Atkinson, in a review of The King and I (1951) in On Stage: Selected Theater Reviews from The New York Times, 1920-1970, edited by Bernard Beckerman and Howard Siegman, Arno Press, 1973, pp. 333-34
As drama critic for the New York Times from 1925 to 1960, Atkinson was one of the most influential reviewers in America.

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