taming the barbarians
Robert
Pirosh, Marc Connelly (screenplay, based on the novel The Passionate Witch by Thorne Smith, complete by Norman H.
Matson), with further dialogue by René Clair, André Rigaud, and Dalton Trumbo
(all uncredited), René Clair (director) I
Married a Witch / 1942
Ernest
Lehman (screenplay, based on the musical by Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard
Rodgers, based, in turn on Margaret Landon’s Anna and the King of Siam), Walter Lang (director) The King and I / 1956
Oscar
Hammerstein II (book and lyrics, based on Margaret Landon’s Anna and the King of Siam), Richard
Rodgers (music) The King and I / Los
Angeles, Hollywood Pantages Theatre / the performance Howard Fox and I attended
was a matinee on January 18, 2017
Unintentionally—what
I might again describe as a fortuitous coincidence—I happened, yesterday, to
watch René Clair’s 1942 fantasy I Married
a Witch and, later that afternoon, attended a traveling stage production of
Bartlett Sher’s The Lincoln Center revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I.
Almost immediately I was struck by the
fact that—although these works, in most ways, are vastly different—both concern
rather exotic worlds in which the major figures find themselves, falling in
love with individuals that are defined by some as barbarians.
Although that word is never uttered in I Married a Witch, it is clear that
Jennifer (Veronica Lake) is an “actual” rather than a societally “perceived” witch,
having centuries ago been condemned to death by Wallace Wooley’s (Fredric March) ancestor, Jonathan. In Clair’s
fantasy she comes back to life only through a trial by fire, the destruction of
a city hotel, and she and her father have long doomed the Wooley tribe to bad
marriages, a tradition Wallace is about to carry out in a forced wedding with a
local political bosses’ daughter, Estelle Masterson (a forever frowning Susan
Hayward).
Accordingly, if there was ever a true
barbarian it is Jennifer and her father Daniel (Cecil Kellaway), set on the
destruction of the civilized world. Indeed, it is the chaos they introduce into
the so-called civilized world that makes the first part of this film so
delightful. It is hard even to sympathize with the hypocritical Wallace and his
ancestors, given their bourgeois aspirations and their sacrifice of their
ideals to community demands.
March, clearly not in love with his
arguing fiancée, spends most of this part of this movie with a drink in his
hand, as he tries to escape Hayward’s scolds.
But the movie shifts course when the
barbarians “get inside,” so to speak, and refuse to leave. And what else can
you do when they’ve squeaked through but to fall in love. It’s interesting just
how influential this film was on later works such as the play and film Bell, Book, and Candle, and the
television series Bewitched. In each
of them falling in love is associated with witch-craft, and requires the male
to readjust to a life with a woman who used magical powers to woe him. Of
course, in the very fact that the woman has also fallen in love, she loses her
powers—or at least in the case of Bewitched,
is compelled to control them.
Obviously, in all three of these
“bewitching” tales, even if the women are originally powerful, they are also
seen to be dangerous outside forces who got their companions through guile and cunning,
and in suggesting this, send subtle misogynistic messages, particularly since
the women must lose those powers to continue the marriage. Yet the surge of the
betwitching powers, in which of these works, is what make them so much fun, and
with the marriage comes necessarily with family members who still may have the
magical gifts, causing embarrassment or outright dangers for the husband. At
the end of I Married a Witch, we see
the couple’s young daughter astride a broom.
The
King and I, obviously, has no witchcraft behind it. Yet, given the
exoticism of the “barbarians’” world that the proper English school marm, Anna
Leonowens (Laura Michelle Kelly) enters, it might as well be magical, which the
sets (in this case by Michael Yeargan), costumes (by Catherine Zuber), and
music all attempt to recreate. The Thailand of Rodgers and Hammerstein is a
gold and marbled fantasy land that has been, quite literally, “dreamed up.” Is
it any wonder that the straight-thinking Anna keeps demanding of the King (José
Llana) a normal home outside the confines of the palace.
Symbolically, of course, she is asking
for a “home” with him, an impossible thing. How is she to become the teacher to
his family and him if she, too, is not a kind concubine, and her refusal to
enter into that state is also what makes her even more interesting to him—not
to say her outlandish dress and manners. In a song I had forgotten, since the
movie had excised it, “Western People Funny,” we get the so-called barbarians’
reaction to Anna and her kind, and we get a new perspective on how the
Victorian hoops and tight ribbons must have appeared to the Siamese.
This King, however, is clearly not stupid,
and quite openly perceives that he will be seen by the English and other
western cultures as a barbarian, particularly if he desires to “build a wall
around Siam to protect his country.” Hearing these lines on stage two days
before the inauguration of a President who has expressed that very desire, made
many in the audience, I am sure, flinch.
Anna sagely advises him to do just the
opposite, to invite the outsiders into his world so that they might see he is
not a true barbarian. Of course, by doing so, the writers and composer hint
that the true barbarians, in this case, may be the westerners, not the people
of Thailand; and this insinuation helps to soften the quite obvious colonialist
sympathies of the musical, something that has always made me winch in watching
the film and stage work. It’s still hard—hearing such works as “A Puzzlement”
and even “I Whistle a Happy Tune”—whose reprise during the King’s death seemed
terribly inappropriate and, I’d argue, should have, as the movie did, been
deleted—as the endless repetition of “etc, etc., etc,” makes it somewhat
difficult to stomach some of this musical’s disdain of cultural differences.
Never mind, by the time the big bash is
over, and we’ve experienced the cross-cultural lectures of the stunning Jerome
Robbins-inspired ballet-within-a musical, “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,”
the situation has radically shifted. The King, a bit like Trump, is now
convinced of his own cleverness, and Anna, after a breathless series of polkas
in “Shall We Dance,” has fallen in love with the seeming barbarian.
Given her position still as an outsider,
however, she cannot completely “redeem” him, and he is still committed to
punishing his slave-concubine from Burma, Tuptin (Manna Nichols). He is, after
all, a kind of barbarian in Anna’s eyes, and recognizing that he remains so in
her eyes, quite literally destroys him.
However, even the fact that the departing
Anna determines to stay on and help the Prince Chulalongkorn (Anthony Chan, so
much better than the movie Prince) during his new reign, it is hard to forgive
her moral abandonment. And, in the end, we do feel that, despite all of her
good intentions, it is she who has been not only the King’s adversary, but his
personal barbarian—a kind of colonialist amazon who has imposed her views and
values upon a vastly developed society, even if it be an autocratic one.
The things that save this musical from
its thematic inconsistencies are many: the wonderful singing of all involved
(although the necessary amplification of voices, given the vast size of the Pantages
theater, was a bit disconcerting), the simple yet elegant settings (including a
gloriously beautiful curtain used to marvelous effect throughout), along with
orchestral settings I’d not heard before which made me aware of just how muted
was the symphonic version presented by the 1956 movie, as well as all the other
stage-craft talents in lighting and costumes, and, of course, Rodgers and
Hammerstein’s resplendent score. Let me just admit that I loved this
production.
Maybe it’s just the times, our fears,
the whole notion that the grand dreams of a global identity are beginning to
crash around us, creating societies of opposition that bear an uncanny
resemblance to the worlds of pre-world War I and II, but I couldn’t shake the
idea that in both these very different works, I was witnessing a battle of
wills between cultures that, despite their attraction, couldn’t quite allow
each other to live or simply be themselves.
Los Angeles,
January 19, 2017
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