The decorations were royal, and so were the voices - on the whole - for the opening night of "The King and I" Tuesday at the Weidner Center.

This is a lush production of the 1954 Rogers and Hammerstein classic, and lush is the operative word. Brilliant reds and golds, wonderful costumes and a great group of kids went a long way toward pleasing the Weidner audience.

They were needed, somewhat, to overcome the creakiness of a 1954 musical. After years of exposure to more modern staging, the scene-song breakup of each number seems antiquated.

What saves it, of course, are the songs; this is one of those shows which, if you haven't seen it, will remind you where so much of our popular music came from.

"Whistle a Happy Tune?" "Hello, Young Lovers?" "Shall We Dance?" They are there, and they are part of the show, helping it along. Try that with today's end-of-movie tagged-on hit.

And it didn't help that the book couldn't have been written in these more "politically-correct" times. One gets the feeling that when Vee Talmadge's King of Siam was howling about the lowliness of women, the laughs in 1954 came from a different sensibility.

Ah, the king. Talmadge must be sick of hearing the words "Yul Brynner," and instead of doing an imitation of the most-famous King, Talmadge went in a different direction - less imperious, more someone who loves life and really thinks it's good to be the king.

He seems to have fun with the role, and makes it a more active character than memories Brynner brings back. He also manages the trick of making someone who could be a petty tyrant into someone we can understand, and even appreciate.

As for Hayley Mills as Anna, the king's hired schoolteacher, she seemed to take a few scenes to warm up. It wasn't until Mills was running around in her nightgown in the king's chambers, berating her treatment, that one got the sense this was a whole person, rather than a caricature of English gentility.

Still, she managed to convey an ocean of quiet in the stormy Siamese court. And there is one definite problem to Mills in the role; she still seems too young to be a widowed governess.

And Mills suffered from the same problem as most of the singers in the cast; the orchestra was just drowning them out. One almost wished for Talmadge's king to order them to go, or at least to pipe down a bit.

But that annoyance was only a small part of a spectacular evening. And one defies any audience seeing this show not to do two things:

There will always be laughter during the grand entrance of the kids - some swaggering, at least one too shy to appear.

And there will always be that applause when, overjoyed at their success, Anna and the King of Siam twirl and leap around the stage to the strains of "Shall We Dance?"