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JUNE
EVENT TIME
CONCIERGE
FLY
Flybe has flights to London City from Aberdeen, Amsterdam, Belfast City, Düsseldorf, Edinburgh, Exeter and
Rennes (from 17th July). Flybe’s franchise partner Blue Islands has flights to London City from Jersey. Flybe has flights to
London Gatwick from Newquay, and to London Heathrow from Aberdeen and Edinburgh. Flybe’s franchise partner Stobart Air
has flights to London Southend from Antwerp, Budapest, Caen-Normandy, Cologne, Dublin, Dubrovnik, Glasgow, Groningen,
Lyon, Manchester, Milan, Prague, Rennes, Vienna and Zadar. Flybe has flights to London Stansted from Newquay
“A sumptuous spectacle directed by Bartlett Sher, the production has four Tony Awards to its name and a
rare full house of rave reviews…”
By royal command
That most magical of musicals,
The King & I
, is coming to London this month.
Jasper Rees explains why you shouldn’t miss it
The King and I
is the most beautiful musical
of them all. Its soaring, stirring overture
gives way to a majestic vision of a life-size
ship snaking upriver at dusk, heading for a
glimmering royal palace in Bangkok. Not every
revival can hope to recapture the splendours
of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Siam, but none
has ravished the eyes and ears quite like the
Lincoln Center production heading for the
London Palladium from 21st June until 29th
September.
A sumptuous spectacle directed by Bartlett
Sher, the production has four Tony Awards to
its name and a rare, full house of rave reviews.
The story of a young English widow, Anna
Leonowens, who takes a job teaching the
children of the King of Siam is one of the
big five from composer Richard Rodgers and
lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. There hasn’t
been a full London production since 2000,
which is why
The King and I
is so eagerly
awaited, with its catchy, happy songs – not
least
I Whistle a Happy Tune
,
Getting to Know
You
and
Shall We Dance?
.
The London Palladium staging boasts
lead actors with enough stage charisma to
blast away memories of other performances.
Nowadays it would not be possible to cast
a non-Asian like Yul Brynner, who played the
king in the film version, in the title role. Ken
Watanabe, with long experience of theatre
in Japan, is known in the west for Clint
Eastwood’s
Letter from Iwo Jima
and
The Last
Samurai
opposite Tom Cruise. He was filming
Godzilla
in Vancouver when Bartlett Sher flew
in to tempt him to play the king.
“He introduced the subject of how I could
do it,” says Watanabe. “I said doing a musical
on stage in English was too tough. I didn’t
have confidence. He said, ‘No no no, just yell or
speak the dialogue. You don’t need to sing or
dance. You are the king!” In fact, Watanabe is a
rather better singer than Brynner, and has two
albums released in Japan to show for it.
More than anything, the show needs a great
actress to play Anna, and for his Broadway
production Sher cast Kelli O’Hara (“The
undisputed Queen of the Broadway musical”,
The Sunday Times
), who he directed in the
multi Tony award-winning production of
South
Pacific
in 2008.
“She has the absolutely best legit voice on
Broadway,” he says. “The purity of that sound,
the control and technique of her singing is
untouchable.”
There is a romantic subplot in
The King
and I
, but what is richly unusual about it is that
the main players act out a subtler and more
deeply-resonant story about east and west,
men and women, tradition and modernity.
It’s beautifully expressed in
Shall We Dance?
,
the climactic duet between Anna and the
King which is most memorable as the ecstatic
meeting of minds, hearts and, most of all, feet.
And that will always be timeless.
www.kingandimusical.co.uk