Rehearsals taking place for the production of The King and I
Bartlett Sher leapt from his ringside seat to suggest how Annalene Beechey might speak a line in The King And I.
‘The only way to get the better of the British is to stand up to them!’ Ms Beechey, playing the governess Anna Leonowens, explains to Jose Llana’s King of Siam.
Sher, the resident director of New York’s Lincoln Center Theater, was in London to dissect the Rodgers and Hammerstein show with his cast before they embark on a tour, which begins at the Manchester Opera House on April 26 and then heads to Dublin, Sunderland, Edinburgh, Leeds and eight other theatres.
There’ll be a month-long break in the summer when Kelli O’Hara and Ken Watanabe, the original leads of the glorious revival that opened at Lincoln Center four years ago and played the London Palladium last year, take the show to Tokyo, before the tour resumes.
Beechey was O’Hara’s principal cover at the Palladium and Sher liked the ‘sophisticated intelligence’ she brought to the role.
Annalene Beechey and Jose Llana perform songs from 'The King and I' on stage during The Olivier Awards 2019
Llana took over from Watanabe in New York. His association with the classic musical goes back to 1996, when he made his debut as Lun Tha, the Burmese scholar who falls for one of the king’s favourites.
Bartlett said that each couple that plays the king and ‘Mrs Anna’ is different, ‘so you want to find their thing, their sparkle’.
He found Beechey and Llana’s sparkle, as it were, during the scene where the king brings up Moses and Abraham Lincoln, and then makes Anna prostrate herself before him. It’s all
