Our 4th of 4 plays was the lavish revival of "The King and I", played in one of the theaters of the Lincoln Center. You have probably seen the movie with Deborah Kerr and Yul Brenner playing out the Rodgers and Hammerstein story of Anna and the King of Siam. Snippets of the music can be played on the Amazon site and the whole thing plays for free if you are on Amazon Prime. The teacher needed to bring his many children into the modern age was imported by the Kind of Thailand. He found he had gotten himself a feisty woman from England, who had her own ideas, backed by her culture, of how to behave and what to teach. He had his own ideas of how a woman should be treated and how she should behave, backed by his culture. There are, of course, clashes ahead.
I didn't realize until working on this blog post that there have been films and books about the British teacher visiting the royal Thai court over quite a period. The familiar Rodgers and Hammerstein music in only one version of the story. If you look up "Anna and the King of Siam", you can find all sorts of information about the telling of the story in various years and formats.
We saw Kelly O'Hara, a popular and pretty woman with excellent theater credentials in the title role. The opening set featured a boat in the harbor. The time was the 1850's and the ship was a sailing vessel. As the first scene progressed, the ship moved toward the audience. It was so realistic, I was afraid I would be sloshed by the harbor water. I knew I was being tricked visually but the rest of me was not convinced I was safe. No water got me.
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