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player ready...It’s a puzzlement. Three seasons ago I saw “The King and I” when it was fresh, opulent, obliquely witty, and staged with a gentle charm. Its intimate Siamese splendors were a fabulous dividend paid to playgoers by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, who wrote it and poured about $350,000 into its staging. You knew that it did not have Mr. Rodgers’ best score, and that Mr. Hammerstein’s book condescended unnecessarily to the King of Siam. Still, it was a warm, rich theater evening, and we who shared it were grateful.
Last night “The King and I” moved into the Shubert theater, with the authors on hand to give their blessing, but it was not the same show. The production was a thin shadow of its once sumptuous self, and the comedy had broadened, sometimes to slapstick. As for the once utterly enchanting Siamese ballet – Mr. Robbins, Mr. Mielziner, how could you?
It is called “The Small House of Uncle Tom,” and it invokes Buddha to intervene as Eliza flees from King Simon of Legree, a tusked personage with demon bloodhounds. When I saw it first its Cambodian candor and superb dancing struck simultaneously at heart and funny bone, while the eye feasted on a muted fairy tale splendor. Now the ballet has degenerated to archness – fallen archness, to use the classic phrase – and both the setting and the lighting equipment seem to have been left in New York. Oddly, this corny version of the ballet is quite deliberate, and it keys the broadening of the show, as if someone had feared the whole thing might be too subtle for touring. . . .
Well, it takes more than that to kill Yul Brynner, who is still superb as the king who imports an English governess to teach his children and learns a bit himself. Mr. Brynner’s make-up is masterly, he has power and wit, and a barbaric resonance as potential as a gong. His comedy is broader – it has to be in this setting – but timed and projected to the flicker of an eyelash.