Photo by Paul Kolnik
Romance, palace intrigue, a pretty Welsh schoolteacher, and the King of Siam, all beautifully gift-wrapped in a fabulous score by Rodgers and Hammerstein and glorious orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett. These are but a few of the elements that account for the success of director Bartlett Sher’s production of The King And I at Lincoln Center Theater, which won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Revival Of A Musical.
Sher worked with a quartet of Tony Award-winning designers—Donald Holder (lighting), Scott Lehrer (sound), Michael Yeargan (sets), and Catherine Zuber (costumes)—the same group that all won Tony Awards for their collaboration on Lincoln Center Theater’s revival of South Pacific in 2008. Now they have given The King And I the royal treatment, creating a jewel box setting filled with shades of gold, amber, amethyst, carnelian, ruby, and sapphire in both the lighting and costumes, the latter of which were awarded the 2015 Tony for Best Costume Design Of A Musical. Read about Holder's lighting design.
An Abandoned Temple
“I had always loved the film The King And I, which I saw when I was just a child, and particularly the ‘Small House of Uncle Thomas’ section,” notes scenic designer Michael Yeargan. “I was fascinated by the presentational quality of the design elements, mainly derived from Asian theatre principles that I had never encountered before. I was too young to understand the many issues—xenophobia, colonialism, misogyny, slavery, to name a few—that the amazing book by Hammerstein dealt with. So to encounter it these many years later was a very different experience. As Bart, Cathy, Don, and I worked on the piece, we began to sense a slightly darker edge to the story that we wanted to bring out which, for me, was mainly influenced by the dark sepia photographs of the court of the King of Siam in the 1860s,” Yeargan adds.
Working in the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, Yeargan knew he could accomplish the large scale of the palace, without filling it with pattern and detail. “We sort of fantasized that it would be amazing if we discovered some immense abandoned Buddhist temple or monastery in the mountains where we could perform The King And I, that all the ornateness was represented by ancient gold that had been applied to weathered teak and that there was an ancient curtain of red silk with gold leaf applied to it that had worn away in an abstract pattern.”
Photo by Paul Kolnik
Yeargan had designed South Pacific and The Light In The Piazza in The Beaumont, discovering that the only satisfying place for the orchestra is under the thrust section of the stage. “The fact that we are using the original orchestrations means that we have a large orchestra of around 30 pieces,” he says regarding The King And I. “Again, as we had done before, we want the audience to know that the orchestra is live and not piped in from some adjoining space, so we devised a slip stage that could move downstage and cover the orchestra after the overture. It is open underneath so the ‘bloom’ of the orchestra can still be experienced due to the wizardry of sound designer Scott Lehrer.”
Talking about the well-known challenges of The Beaumont as a venue, Yeargan notes, “I don’t find it challenging at all. I love the scale of it, combined with the intimacy of the thrust. Given the advances in sound design, one can really utilize the depth of the space upstage. As we want the audience members to feel as if they are actually inside our world, we actually built a sort of open ceiling that goes from out in the auditorium to the upstage edge of the set. So the upstage space is totally connected to the downstage space and one could feed the other.”
Two of the set elements started as metaphorical ideas, reflecting issues dealt within the show. “The first of these is the ship that brings Anna and her son to Siam,” says Yeargan. “It is described in the first pages of Margaret Langdon’s book, Anna And The King Of Siam, upon which the show is based. We felt it was crucial to see this moment of her arrival, rather than discovering her already there and that the ship, a big dirty smoke-spouting tramp steamer, in a way represents the West clashing with the exoticism of the East, and that the sight of local inhabitants coming down one aisle is what is terrifying to Louis. Given the Beaumont stage, we were blessed with the depth to build a forced perspective boat that illustrates this arrival. Upstage of it is a translucent drop indicating a sunset over the river that leads into the harbor of Bangkok, and on stage-right, riverfront native buildings on stilts are a contrast to the sparseness and elegance of the palace interior.”
Ancient Gold & Weathered Teak
Photo by Paul Kolnik
Yeargan designed the boat to be built in three sections so it can split apart, turn around, and as Yeargan explains it, “evoke harbor-side shanties for the scene with the Kralahome following. Featured prominently in the scene is also a palette with all of Anna’s very English belongings. The boat is propelled by stagehands inside who follow marks on the floor to get it to its desired position. Once the boat is on the slip stage, it begins to move down to cover the orchestra and also bring the boat down onto the thrust stage and seemingly, right out into the house.”
The second element is the large gray, highly distressed crenellated wall that is copied from the actual white wall that surrounds the royal palace in Siam. “On one level, the actual plot is propelled by Anna’s frustration that the King’s promise of a private house of her own ‘outside the palace walls’ has been ignored and that she is almost a prisoner in the palace,” Yeargan explains. “So once we arrive at the palace, this wall is in all of those scenes, until Anna leaves after the capture and beating of Tuptim. So not only does it represent her ‘imprisonment,’ it also represents the centuries of absolute monarchy that is beginning to crumble in response to newer western ideas.”
To suggest the different locales within the palace, Yeargan designed four pairs of motorized columns that can reconfigure and combine with props to indicate different places. “There are also several sets of gauze panels to give a density to the upstage area when we are in more intimate scenes, such as the King’s study and Anna’s bedroom,” he says, “and one immense golden Buddha.”
Photo by Paul Kolnik
ShowMotion in Milford, CT built and engineered the set and the major props, with painting charged by Lynn Muniz. Joe Forbes’ Scenic Arts Studios in Newburgh, NY painted the Bangkok harbor sunset translucency, the silk gold leaf curtain, and several other scenic elements. “My design for the silk and gold curtain was too complicated in its requested movement, and it ended up being too noisy and persnickety in its rigging, which was easily resolved after we simplified the movement,” explains Yeargan, who also simplified many of the architectural details and colors for the sake of focus. “All of the motifs and prop details were straight from the research.”
The lighting and set, as well as the costumes, work hand-in-glove. “Don and I have done so many shows together now that we sort of have an unspoken language between us,” Yeargan points out. “When we do talk, it’s more about positions and masking than about ideas. For example, we wanted the upstage area to appear very wide and for the wall to seem to go on forever, so we kept the upstage space as wide as possible and actually put mirrors running upstage/downstage to do that. I was very concerned about not having true ‘wings’ to mask the lights, but in the end, the beauty of the cues overpowered any worry about actually seeing the lights.”
Yeargan knew that the costumes required free reign when it came to color, so he kept to a muted palette of sepia tones and gold to emphasize Zuber’s design choices. “Cathy is such a terrific designer that there is very little need for conversation,” says Yeargan, who worked on the designs for almost a year. “It is very difficult for me to be judgmental of them. I feel we did what we set out to do and that the designs really support the story as we wanted to tell it. My favorite moments are the impression the set gives when one enters the theatre from the doors at the back of the house, the opening sequence of the arrival of the boat and the audience’s reaction to it, and the moment when the wall ascends in Act Two.”
Yeargan attributes the smooth transitions to Sher’s excellent direction, noting, “He is terrific with coordinating set movement with the arrival of hand-pushed furniture. We both are not huge fans of over-mechanized scene changes.”
Check out more on lighting, sound, and costume design.