Broadway vet tours back to Chicago as 'The King and I' lead
Rodgers and Hammerstein's classic 1951 musical “The King and I” is once again a major part of Jose Llana's life. The actor has starred in two different Tony Award-winning Broadway revivals of the show, and now he is headlining a national tour of Lincoln Center Theater's 2015 production that plays a three-week run at Chicago's Oriental Theatre starting this week.
“The show will always be very sentimentally connected to me,” Llana said. “It started my career and it put me in New York's theater community.”
In the tour, Llana stars as the King of Siam (now Thailand) opposite Olivier Award-winner Laura Michelle Kelly (“Mary Poppins”). She plays British schoolteacher Anna Leonowens, who was invited in the 1860s to teach English and other Western customs to the children of the royal Siamese court.
Llana was a 19-year-old college freshman when he was cast in the 1996 Broadway revival of “The King and I” that starred Lou Diamond Phillips and Donna Murphy. Llana, who is Filipino-American, played the Burmese lover Lun Tha opposite Joohee Choi as Tuptim, and the two got to sing the famed romantic duets “We Kiss in a Shadow” and “I Have Dreamed.”
“Then 20 years later to have (director) Bartlett Sher ask me to take over for Ken Watanabe in this Broadway revival, but this time to play the King of Siam, to be honest it was personally intimidating,” said Llana about his 2016 return to the show. “In my mind, I was still the 'young lover.'”
But with Sher's help, Llana said he was able to craft quite a different king from Watanabe's Tony-nominated take on the role. The difference in ages was a huge factor.
“I'm one of the younger kings to play the part - I just turned 41 - and I bring a lot of who I am naturally and honestly,” said Llana, emphasizing the strength of Oscar Hammerstein's script to encompass such different performers.
Llana says that the late Yul Brynner, who originated the role on stage and is preserved in the 1956 film version, also casts a long shadow. In many subsequent community theater productions, Llana said that Brynner's mannerisms as the king became exaggerated.
“Over time, the King became very cartoonish,” Llana said. “People associated him with his hands on his waist and talking in this pidgin talk as the silly king with 50 wives.”
To counter that image, Llana said that Sher reexamined the musical by emphasizing more of the historical and political aspects of the time period that allowed Siam to maintain its independence and avoid becoming a European colonial outpost. Llana said the feminist critiques that Hammerstein weaves throughout the material were also brought to the fore.
“All those things combined helps any actor,” Llana said. “There's so many great political lines and for myself, it was instrumental in forming my young king as a young leader trying to figure things out - particularly in the very hostile political climate that we're in right now in America.”
Llana is looking forward to briefly returning to Chicago. He has happy memories from his Jeff Award-nominated turn as “Tin Man Wong” in the world-premiere western musical “The Ballad of Little Jo” for Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2000.
“It was a really beautiful part and a beautiful show,” Llana said. “I just saw that the Two Rivers Theater in New Jersey is mounting a new production of it, so the show it still alive.”
“The King and I”
Location: Oriental Theatre, 24 W. Randolph St., Chicago, (800) 775-2000 or
Showtimes: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday (also Sunday, June 18), 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. matinees Wednesday and Sunday; from Wednesday, June 14, through Sunday, July 2
Tickets: $21-$87