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A STORY IN MOTION
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A WOMAN ADVENTURER
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a paradigm for the action of the entire show. The duo’s ideas about it had sent Robbins “off his head” with excitement when he was approached about the project, according to the producer Leland Hayward; but now its confrontation between Eastern conventions and Western ideals was proving to be an almost unsolvable conundrum for the choreographer, and a source of agony for his dancers. An insatiable autodidact, Robbins was obsessed with the idea of keeping the show’s movement authentic. He had schooled himself in the conventions of Southeast Asian court dancing, with its hyperextended fingers and flexed feet; and now, bringing in experts in Indian Bharata Natyam and Cambodian apsara dance, he put the entire company through weeks of grueling training, eight hours a day, in movement conventions that were as foreign to their bodies as Bangkok had been to the governess Anna Leonowens. They stretched their hands, they knelt on the cold marble floor with one leg crossed beneath them, they rolled in the dust. They growled like tigers, ran like deer. “You need more urgency,” yelled Robbins at Yuriko Kikuchi, who played Eliza, the runaway slave; then, when he had chased her around the lobby for what seemed like hours, he complained, “You’ve lost your Oriental quality.” Yuriko, who would later become a perennial stager of “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” in a succession of revivals, said, “The only way to counter this is to produce what is wanted.” Robbins himself, however, couldn’t produce what was wanted. “He did maybe five minutes of choreography in about two or
Photo by Martha Swope, courtesy of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization.
In the cold winter of 1951, the choreographer Jerome Robbins was rehearsing dancers for a new musical in the grubby lobby of the empty Broadway Theatre, and he was having a hard time. Although he was already a hugely successful master of both ballet and musical theater, his work in both genres had been largely jazz-inflected and bore a made-in-America stamp; and the show that he was creating dances for now, by the legendary duo of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, could not have been more different. Based on the fictionalized biography Anna and the King of Siam, by Margaret Landon, it told the story of a Victorian English widow who becomes governess to the children of King Mongkut of Siam and precipitates a fateful cultural conflict when the King’s reluctant junior wife, Tuptim, runs away, following the example of the slave Eliza in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin—a book the governess has given her. The King and I, as the musical version was to be called, had an opulent score full of quasi-Asian motifs, and a nearly unprecedented budget of $360,000, mainly for lavish and exotic sets and costumes aimed at re-creating nineteenth-century Bangkok. It was also supposed to have a second-act ballet, “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” a re-creation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in traditional Thai court dance, which was the heart of The King and I, for it was an anecdote about a royal concubine’s fascination with Stowe’s book that had first drawn Hammerstein to the project, and he and Rodgers saw the ballet as
three weeks,” Yuriko recalls. Confessing himself “stumped,” he showed the result to Rodgers and Hammerstein. “Rodgers said to Jerry, ‘I write the sense of the place into the music, but I don’t try to create Asian music. You don’t have to stick so close, to try and make it authentic.’” The composer encouraged Robbins to use his Broadway instincts to shape his Asian material. “And Jerry said, ‘That frees me.’ ” Yuriko recalls. Over the next weeks, he created a ballet that was an embodiment of the cultural dialogue that is the substance of the show, and became almost as famous as The King and I itself. As Robbins had to learn how to balance authenticity and showmanship, the team behind Lincoln Center Theater’s new revival of The King and I must find an equilibrium between tradition and innovation. Both the director, Bartlett Sher, and the choreographer, Christopher Gattelli, share common ground with the creators of The King and I: Sher’s attraction to the project, like Hammerstein’s, was sparked by “Anna’s offering of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Tuptim, [which] sets in motion a whole story of radicalization and transformation”; and he and Gattelli took pains to immerse themselves in Robbins’s sources for his choreography, “so we could stand in his shoes.” For his part, Gattelli, who first experienced The King and I when he performed in a high-school production, thought the “Small House” ballet “staggering” when he saw the film version on video and then again in Jerome Robbins’ Broadway. But he also finds it exciting “to get my hands on that ballet, to be able to peek behind the curtain and learn what every move is about, to spend time reinvigorating it in this new production.” How do you reinvigorate something as iconic as “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” which—restaged by its choreographer— helped win a Tony Award for Jerome Robbins’ Broadway and is still available on film (and on DVD and Blu-ray)? Interestingly, Sher and Gattelli started with a device that Jerome Robbins himself used: a ten-day dance workshop for dancers, instrumentalists, the director, the choreographer, and
the coaches, including a specialist in Chinese opera performance. For ten days, the participants worked at “combing out the twenty-first century physicality from the dancers’ bodies,” as Gattelli puts it. Although the workshop was situated in the comfort of the LCT studios instead of in an underheated disused Broadway theater, it pushed everyone beyond their comfort zone in true Robbins fashion. “Partly to adjust to the Beaumont’s thrust stage,” Sher says, “partly to expand it, we came up with what I call Robbins on steroids—more kicks, more jumps, more people. It’s not like we changed it, but what bodies can do now is more amazing even than in 1951.” Gattelli adds, “We’re dialing up the temperature.” Where the original “Small House” ballet was framed by a proscenium and had the air of a pageant, with the King and his audience off to one side, “now the ballet is danced specifically to and at the King,” he comments. There will be other changes threaded through the production: new dancing to accompany newly discovered music, used in the original to cover scene changes; new choreography for the entrance of the King’s children; moments where, as Gattelli says, “we realized we don’t have to do it the way it has been done, but we can put our own stamp on it.” One thing, however, remains unchanged, and it’s possibly the thing the original choreographer would be most insistent about. In LCT’s dance lab last fall, every dancer learned every other dancer’s part, “as if they were all a part of the royal ballet company,” Gattelli says. Back in 1951, Yuriko recalls, Jerome Robbins told them the same thing. “You are all born dancers in the royal family,” he said. “From generation to generation, an honored family of dancers. So whatever you do has dignity.” Amanda Vaill is the author of Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins, as well as of the screenplay for the Emmy-winning PBS documentary Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About. Her most recent book is Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War.
Half a century before Anna Leonowens met King Mongkut of Siam in 1862, Lady Hester Stanhope, the adored niece of the former British prime minister, clip-clopped out of London never to return, her aristocratic nose high in the air. It is important to mention Hester Stanhope’s nose, because, Lytton Strachey said, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! it was a nose “of wild ambitions, of pride grown fantastical, a nose that scorned the earth, shooting off…towards some eternal eccentric heaven.” It was a nose, in other words, that would open doors for a woman adventurer. The deaths of her uncle, William Pitt the Younger, and of both !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! her brother and Lieutenant General Sir John Moore in the Battle BY BRANDEN JA CO B S- J EN KI N of Corunna, the man she might have married, put paid to any prospect of conventional life for Lady Hester. Had she and her nose remained in London, they would have wed themselves to a man of power and ruled Regency drawing rooms. As a political hostess, Hester Stanhope would make polite tours of Europe. Like other women of her abilities, she would have lived her husband’s life to the full. It was therefore an act of defiance, courage, and great originality to leave the world she knew for terra incognita. But while Hester Stanhope made a decision to live outside the "#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#" bounds of conventional society, Anna Leonowens had no choice. Packed in Hester’s trunk was one of Moore’s blood-stained gloves, the blue dress she had worn as a child, and a lock of her brother’s hair. This was the last she would see of gloves, locks, or " frocks. Shaving her and attiring in " the garb of"""""""" " """ """" "head """ "" """herself """" "" "" an Asiatic monarch, Hester Stanhope rode in state through the BYworK ATO R I H AL L desert with weaponry clanking at her side. In Cairo she was shipped as a deity, in Damascus she was hailed as a queen, in Palmyra she was crowned as the new Zenobia. “The Arabs,” she coolly observed, “have never looked upon me in the light either of a man or of a woman, but as un être à part.” Anna Leonowens, apparently addressed as “Sir” in the Siamese court, was also un être à part and equally adept at reinvention. Conversant in Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, and Persian, to take on the role of royal governess she adopted the clipped tones of a dyed-in-the-wool English school ma’am. She had not yet stepped foot in England, and remains the only foreigner to have lived inside the court of Siam. The truth about Anna Harriet Emma Edwards, as she was christened, is buried beneath a palimpsest of fictions, many of which she herself propounded. While Lady Hester belonged to the cultural and political center, Anna was raised in the margins. Born in Bombay in 1831 to an Indian or half-Indian mother, who was thirteen years old when she married, and a father who was a lowly employee of the East India Company, Anna later doctored her biography so that her maiden name became Crawford, her birthplace Caernarfon, in Wales, and her father’s rank that of a major. “The most important thing in your life,” she noted, “is to choose your parents.” That observation, which might have been made by Oscar Wilde, was typically resourceful. At the age of
HOUSES VS . C
WHAT’S IN A
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