25 July 2018, The Tablet

Out of time: The King and I


Out of time: The King and I

Ken Watanabe and Kelli O'Hara
Photo: Matthew Murphy

 

Only eight years after Pearl Harbor, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein boldly wrote a 1949 Broadway musical, South Pacific, that sympathetically represented Asia. Which makes it even odder that, only two years after that pioneering anti-racist piece, the writers’ second visit to the region, The King and I, became an epitome of a show with dangerously dated racial attitudes.

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