PREVIEW: 'The King & I,' starring Hayley Mills, presented by Celebrity Attractions

By James D. Watts Jr. World Entertainment Writer
1/11/98

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday and Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Thursday and Saturday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday
Where: Chapman Music Hall, Tulsa Performing Arts Center, Third Street and Cincinnati Avenue
Tickets: Tickets are extremely limited; call the PAC ticket office, 596-7111 for availability

It has been almost 40 years since Hayley Mills became a star, in such Disney films as "Pollyanna" and "The Parent Trap."

And for some fans, that particular star has never dimmed.

"It's really quite extraordinary -- and quite wonderful, I must say -- that people remember those old movies with such affection," Mills said. "I'm always meeting people here in America who know me from those films, and it's like encountering old friends -- they are just so warm and welcoming."

Mills has had plenty of opportunity of late to have such encounters. Since April she has been touring the United States with the new, lavish production of "The King & I," Rodgers and Hammerstein's beloved musical.

The production comes to Tulsa for eight performances beginning Wednesday at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center. "The King & I" is a part of Celebrity Attractions' "Give Your Regards to Broadway" series.

This is the same production that swept the 1996 Tony Awards, where it starred Donna Murphy and Lou Diamond Phillips (the current Broadway cast features Marie Osmond and Kevin Gray).

It certainly promises to be the most lavish Broadway show to come to town since "The Phantom of the Opera." It takes 10 trucks to transport the sets and costumes from town to town.

"Oh yes, we're a regular little army when we're on the road," Mills said, laughing. She was speaking by phone from Denver, where the company had taken up residence for most of the month of December.

"There's 75 of us all told, the actors, the orchestra, and all the children have their parents with them. It's just daunting, the sheer size of this. And somehow we all manage to appear in the same place at the right time, and the curtain goes up, and we have this show."

This show is the most enduring version of a story that dates back to the 1870s, when Anna Leonowens published two memoirs of her life in Siam -- "A British Governess in the Siamese Court" and "Romance of the Harem." The books were based on the five years Leonowens spent tutoring all 70 or so of the royal children.

Although Leonowens' books provided Western readers with their first glimpse of the life and culture of this Asian country, some considered her account of life in the Siam court considerably embellished.

In 1943, Margaret Landon, who herself had spent a decade in Siam, published a novel called "Anna and the King of Siam," which drew heavily on Leonowens' books. It was filmed in 1946 with Irene Dunne and Rex Harrison in the title roles.

The film prompted actress Gertrude Lawrence to seek out Landon's novel, and she bought the rights to turn it into a musical. She first approached Cole Porter, who turned her down, then Rodgers and Hammerstein, who also turned her down. However, Lawrence persisted and composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II took on the project.

The resulting musical, now titled "The King and I," opened in 1951, and made a star of the unknown actor playing the King, Yul Brynner. Brynner became inextricably linked with the role of the King, playing it in film, on TV (a short-lived CBS series co-starring Samantha Eggar) and more than 4,600 times on stage.

"The King and I" has returned to Broadway numerous times -- at least once a decade. Yet the version that now is running in New York, and which inspired the current touring production, came to America via a circuitous route.

Director Christopher Renshaw first created this "King and I" -- one that tries to balance gilt-drenched spectacle with a more sophisticated and truthful portrait of what is now Thailand -- in 1991 in Australia. And the person he chose to play Anna was Hayley Mills.

"It just came out of the blue," Mills recalled. "I had done theater in past, even did some musical things, but nothing on this scale. And it's a very physically and emotionally demanding role -- you've got six songs, lots of dancing and carrying on, and when you aren't on stage, you're changing costumes."

However, Mills met those challenges in such a way that the Australian production caught the attention of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization in New York City. Mary Rodgers, daughter of Richard Rodgers, came to Australia to see the production and was so taken by it that she began working on bringing the show to the United States.

The current tour, which began in April, has been something of a comeback experience for Mills. Although she has worked more or less steadily since her debut in the 1959 film "Tiger Bay," much of that work has been on the stage in England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in films that rarely crossed the Atlantic, or in TV productions ("The Flame Trees of Thika," seen here on PBS' "Masterpiece Theater") that did.

There was a time, however, when Hayley Mills seemed to be everywhere, from movie screens to magazine covers to paper dolls. However, Mills said, all the adulation she received from her early movies was strictly an American phenomenon and one from which she felt herself removed, since she only came to this country to make the films.

Mills started doing stage work as a way, she said, of "taking charge of my life at last" -- a life that, with its various personal and romantic upheavals, provided fodder for the British tabloid press.

"To go on stage after spending 12 years in front of cameras was a pretty scary experience," she recalled. "My acting up to that time had been more or less instinctive, so I was learning as I went along. And I know I made some horrendous mistakes along the way.

"But I quickly realized that core of what you do as an actor remains the same, whether in film or on the stage," she said. "On stage, however, you have to have a kind of sixth sense about the space in which you work, that you have to use your whole being to express a thought or emotion."


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