Thai-dyed

The once and future King and I

by Carolyn Clay

THE KING AND I, Music by Richard Rodgers. Book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Based on the novel Anna and the King of Siam, by Margaret Landon. Directed by Christopher Renshaw. Musical staging by Lar Lubovitch. Choreography by Jerome Robbins. Set design by Brian Thompson. Costumes by Roger Kirk. Lighting by Nigel Levings. Musical direction by Kevin Farrell. With Hayley Mills, Vee Talmadge, Ernest Abuba, Helen Yu, Luzviminda Lor, Timothy Ford Murphy, Ian Stuart, Jesse McCartney, and Andrew Guyvijitr. At the Wang Center for the Performing Arts through October 11.

It takes a big stage to accommodate this production of The King and I -- half to hold the glittering Thai pageantry, half to disappear under Hayley Mills's hoop skirts, which are considerably fuller than her singing voice. This is a lavish revival of a 1950s favorite, with a 1960s favorite in the lead. It's charming, and she's charming -- if you can overlook the fact that she barely warbles and the Rodgers & Hammerstein retelling of Welsh schoolteacher Anna Leonowens's on-again off-again love affair with 1860s Siam is a musical. It isn't that Mills can't carry a tune, or even that she is unpleasant to listen to. But she has a very limited range and a sort of baby voice. Worse, she is so obviously making a concentrated effort that the essential musical-theater leap, when conversation soars naturally if improbably into song, is marred.

That said, this is an opulent and enjoyable show, only minimally bogged down by the formality and imperialism built into the 1951 musical (the revival of which has sparked some Asian-community protest in these politically correct times). There is no getting around the fact that The King and I, for all its beloved melodies, presupposes a cutely totalitarian Siam peopled by isolated, ignorant, terrified, and toadying subjects tyrannized by an exotic bully in need of Westernizing (and birth control). But, hey, that's the story, as filtered from the memoirs of the actual Anna Leonowens through Margaret Landon's Anna and the King of Siam to Rodgers & Hammerstein, who at least supply the musical's King with a sly charisma and self-doubts. Not to mention, in the case of this revival, hair! Vee Talmadge is a potentate with a pony tail -- may Yul Brynner rest in skinhead peace.

In defense of Mills, whose tonsils must play tortoise to the hares in the throats of Helen Yu's Lady Thiang and Luzviminda Lor's Tuptim, it's worth mentioning that the original Anna, Gertrude Lawrence, wasn't much of a singer either. Musical-theater historian Gerald Bordman writes of composer Rodgers: "For his fine singers he was able to write as much arioso music as the market would tolerate, while for Miss Lawrence he wrote gay, simple, appealingly sentimental melodies" -- at least one of which, "Hello, Young Lovers," is nonetheless out of Mills's ken. The actress does make a convincingly prim yet warm, flinty Anna; manage skirts that could well house a traveling circus; and every once in a while remind us fortysomethings that she's the same irrepressible Hayley Mills who unfroze Agnes Moorehead in Pollyanna. This is particularly true on her fumingly talk-sung "Shall I Tell You What I Think of You?" Here a corset-clad Mills loses the billowing carapace, lets her hair down, and takes to the floor in a pique, going so far as to waggle her butt like the sycophantic dog the King desires his citizenry to be.

The production itself originated -- with director Christopher Renshaw at the helm and Mills as Anna -- in Australia. It was then exported to Broadway where, with Donna Murphy and Lou Diamond Phillips in the leads, it won three 1996 Tonys, including those for set and costume design. The staging is indeed a spendiferous, if glitzy, pageant in reds and golds, some of its Thai cachet authentic, some of it Broadway-ersatz. Most of the highly competent cast of nearly 50 is Asian.

There are sound vocal and emotional turns by Lor and Timothy Ford Murphy as the doomed lovers Tuptim and Lun Tha (though their relationship is characterized here by a lot of decidedly Western clinging and groping). Yu is a wise, human Lady Thiang whose operatic paean to her erratic love-and-master, "Something Wonderful," is thrilling if hard to understand. The Royal Children, skittering about in toddler terror of the Dad, meet cuteness requirements. And the re-creation of Jerome Robbins's Eastern-toned choreography for the "Small House of Uncle Thomas" ballet is loving and precise.

There is, perhaps, not as much sexual tension -- that '50s crackle-and-pop -- between Mills's Anna and Talmadge's King as there might be. He is more brazen but less physical than Brynner in the role, and she's, well, Hayley Mills. But there is an electric spark when he abandons the friendly hand-holding to take her firmly by the waist for "Shall We Dance?" that makes you want to stuff free love and return to girdles and giddy dancing. Surely this innocent, exhilarated polka, rendered here in all its romping Cinderella splendor, is among the most delicious of American-musical-theater chestnuts.