By Dee Jefferson
The King and I opens in Sydney this week off the back of successful seasons in Brisbane and Melbourne, overwhelmingly positive reviews from the major papers, and a Helpmann Award for Best Musical. At time of writing, $8.4 million worth of tickets had already sold for the Sydney season alone – the highest presales for any show ever staged at the Sydney Opera House.
On the face of it, Opera Australia and John Frost's revival of Christopher Renshaw's Tony Award-winning 1991 production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical is an unequivocal success – and one that, by Opera Australia projections, over a quarter of a million people will have seen by the time the Sydney season closes.
There is a discoverable seam of discontent, however, running through this apparently monolithic "success". It's in a handful of reviews and online comments that take exception with the "orientalist" presentation of race in the musical, which was itself based on Margaret Landon's 1944 novelisation of the already-sensational memoirs of Welsh widow Anna Leonowens about her experiences in King Mongkut of Siam's court in the early 1860s.
Reviews in The Age, Crikey's Daily Review and Aussie Theatre expressed concern that ran from reservations about the "un-PC" orientalism in the text to criticisms of Christopher Renshaw's direction. The Australian's review of the Brisbane premiere said, "A pall of caricature hangs over most of the Asian characters."
Lisa McCune in The King and I.Credit: Michael Clayton-Jones
There's also the matter of casting Teddy Tahu Rhodes, a white New Zealander, as the Thai King Mongkut for the Brisbane and Sydney seasons – and his performance of that role, of which Fairfax's Brisbane reviewer wrote: "Hearing Rhodes take on the King of Siam's broken English is initially jarring, like listening to everyone's least favourite uncle do his best joke about Chinese drivers at a family gathering."
The King and I's issues around "representation" are nothing new and have become increasingly apparent in recent decades as the Western world has become more knowledgeable about Asia, as attitudes towards colonisation and empire have changed, and as audiences have begun to diversify.
In fact, when you take into account the age of the source material, the fact that post-colonial theory is standard in academia, together with the rising non-English-speaking background population, it's perhaps surprising that more Australians in 2014 aren't bothered by The King and I. Opera Australia artistic director Lyndon Terracini says he received a total of zero complaint letters about the current revival, adding, "I usually get three or four letters a week complaining about something in an opera."
It could mean that most people don't care; it could mean that the people who might care aren't in the audience; it could also be that the audiences are so used to this particular story (on stage and screen), and the white vision of other cultures in general (including many golden era musicals and films) that they don't notice it.
Yonghoon Lee as Cavaradossi and Alexia Voulgaridou as Floria Tosca in Tosca.Credit: Prudence Upton
And let's face it, if you're buying a ticket to The King and I you're not going for a nuanced vision of race relations – you're going for the fantasy and the music; you're likely aware that it was written by two white guys who had only the most superficial understanding of Thai culture, for an audience that was almost exclusively white and almost entirely ignorant of the country, its people and their history
Which begs the question: should we be staging The King and I at all, in this time and place? And if not, then where do works like Madama Butterfly stand?
Orientalism criticised: Lisa McCune as Anna and Teddy Tahu Rhodes as the king in The King and I.Credit: Dallas Kilponen
"Rodgers and Hammerstein's view of Thai culture is exactly the same as Puccini's view of Japanese culture," Terracini argues. "Puccini had never been to Japan, had no idea what it was about, and at the time he wrote [Madama Butterfly] in Italy there was a similar fascination for all things Japanese. He was opportunistic, and he wrote that piece to appeal to the audience."
But for Terracini, who programmed it in OA's 2014 season, there's no question: Rodgers and Hammerstein's repertoire is to musical theatre as Puccini is to opera – a staple and a question of artistic merit. Casting, too, he characterises as "colour blind" and based on merit, not skin tone. ("Colour blind" casting is endemic in opera culture and it works both ways – Yonghoon Lee is cast as Cavaradossi in OA's Tosca; Ji-Min Park as Alfredo in La Traviata, and so on.)
Simon O'Neill, right, in dark face make-up as Otello.Credit: Anthony Johnson
But it is also, evidently, a question of demand: "If that many people want to see it, then it must have something going for it," Terracini says. "And I must say too, the ethnic diversity of the audience is far greater than what we usually see at the opera. … That says to me that the community embraces it and the community doesn't have a problem with it."
Talking about Opera Australia's recent production of Otello, where New Zealand tenor Simon O'Neill wore dark face make-up, Bell Shakespeare founder and co-artistic director John Bell (who created a new iteration of Tosca for Opera Australia in 2013) says it would be "very difficult" to do that in a theatre production. But, he argues: "The conventions [of opera] are more traditional, and I think people kind of accept 'this is not supposed to be for real'. And I think if it's a great singer, I don't think anyone's going to object too much about the guy 'blacking up'."
Bell, and Belvoir's artistic director Ralph Myers, both offer up another option: let the best actor or singer get the role, but do away with the clumsy racial signifiers such as make-up and accents. This argument is particularly compelling in the case of works like Othello and The King and I, where the basic narrative premise is so well known that there's surely no risk of audience confusion.
Griffin Theatre Company's artistic director Lee Lewis, a long-time champion of cross-racial casting, reckons it's not quite that simple and echoes the sentiments of playwright Andrew Bovell, in his keynote address to the National Play Festival in June, talking about the "white triangle" of Australian theatre: "The repetition of doing [a certain kind of play] – say Arthur Miller, with an all-white cast – again and again and again means that the only visioning that people who go to the theatre are seeing is a 'white imagined space'. The question we need to ask is, 'Who belongs in our high art? And do we always want it to be that way?' "
In other words, in the predominantly white world of opera, musical theatre and theatre, there is a politics – unwitting or intentional – to casting any character of colour with a white person. What's good for the goose is not necessarily good for the gander.
Of course, at the end of the day any theatre company can put on any show they like within the limits of the law; no one is forced to buy tickets – and as long as no one is deceived in the marketing of said production, then what harm?
This private-enterprise prerogative becomes complicated, in Opera Australia's case, by the politics of taxpayer-funded art (in 2013 Opera Australia received $25.2 million in government funding).
"I would say there's a governmental question there," says Lewis. "Do you continue to fund institutional racism? [Opera Australia's] unwillingness to engage with the people who have concerns [about racism in The King and I] is part of the problem."
Dee Jefferson is the Arts Editor of Time Out Sydney.