When he designed the set for last year’s The Bridges Of Madison County, Tony Award winner Michael Yeargan fashioned a bridge out of pieces rolled on stage. With the current Tony Award-winning production of The King and I at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre, he has assembled four pairs of moving pillars to help create different room configurations for the King of Siam’s palace. The production co-stars Tony winner Kelli O’Hara as the English schoolteacher brought to teach the children of the proud King of Siam, and Ken Watanabe as the King, who learns life lessons from the schoolteacher as well.
They also move out of the way for the opening, where a large steamer rolls out on stage, and when a play about “the small house of Uncle Thomas” is presented to visiting Western dignitaries to Siam. Their flowing motion helps drive the overall design.
“The King and I is a bit problematic for the set designer, because almost the whole show takes place in the palace,” Yeargan tells PLSN. “In the original production designed by Jo Mielziner, the ship was an in one [very shallow scene]. There was a drop, some set pieces, and then it opened up into the palace. For the ballet of the small house of Uncle Thomas, they pretty much had to clear the stage to get the full depth. That’s one reason why the show is set up the way it is. We found that we had to do kind of the same thing in that it’s so written into the script.”
The Palace
Yeargan says that once the world of the palace was established, the approach became about variations on a theme. The tall, majestic pillars offered “a really quick way to give a sense of change of place,” he says. “We also have gauze panels that came in for the intimate scenes, and the ever present [white] back wall of the palace, which was kind of metaphorical for us. We did a lot of research into the real Anna Leonowens and in reading her memoirs, she mentions many times she felt like she was imprisoned in the palace. That’s where that white wall came from, and it’s a copy of the real one, it’s just more aged and distressed. We were trying to give a sense of antiquity to it. Then when it goes up at the end, it’s kind of a big moment because the King is dying and the old world is going away and a new world is being born.”
The four sets of two pillars, which are each two feet square, 30 feet tall, and made of wood with a metal structure inside of them, rise up to “an amazing truss work at the top with diagonals that keep them from swinging,” explains Yeargan. “The two center pillars [which stand at nearly 40 feet], the ones that are closest down stage that fly in and out, are also on the track so as they’re flying in or out, they can also be moving because they make a diagonal move as they are flying out, which is great.”
Show Motion designed the mechanization which propels the pillars. According to Yeargan, they are computer programmed and can track at any speed. There are two pillars on each track that can be moved separately or synchronized with each other. He says the pillar were the easiest part of the whole set to design.
He notes that Don Holder’s lighting was important because of the openness of the set and because it extended so far into the wings. “We finally decided to let it be exposed, because you couldn’t mask it,” recalls Yeargan. “I can’t remember how it worked out, but I think he was very close to the same height [as the pillar track] because he had to get under the track. The track was this huge truss that was two foot square also, so we had to get through that. There’s quite a bit of space between them. There must’ve been 12 feet between each set of columns. The only other big things that flew in the show were the blossoms for the garden scene and the gauze panels.”
The pillars create different room configurations throughout the show for the main palace, the schoolroom, the King’s private chambers, Anna’s bedroom and the banquet hall, which features six Western chandeliers that re-emerge for the famous “Shall We Dance” sequence. “Then there’s the big moment where the wall flies and you see the cast silhouetted against the white and they go off as far as they can,” says Yeargan.
All in all, much of the palace is also created through suggestion and lighting rather than an overabundance of set pieces, and it was an intentional design not to be too ostentatious. When Yeargan looked over pictures of the real Royal Palace, he was struck by how incredibly ornate and busy it was. “Everything was covered with mosaics or tiles or gold or patterns, and we just didn’t want to do that because it’s just so hard to focus,” he remarks. “In a previous production, there was just so much gold. We read that the King had been a Buddhist monk up until he was about 35 or 40 years old when he became king, so we thought we should play on that sensibility. We found these amazing temples that were wood with gold patterns stenciled onto them, and that was the inspiration for the basic structure of the set.”
Additional set elements that enhanced the atmosphere were the beautiful silks appliquéd with gold leaf (by artists at Scenic Arts Studios), “which is where the down stage curtain came from,” says Yeargan. “That also gave you a sense of otherness and took you out of the West. We use it almost like a kabuki curtain where you actually see someone pulling it across as opposed to flying it in and out. We didn’t know that it was going to respond so amazingly to the air currents. It would do this wonderful pattern when pulled that was quite magical.”
The Ship
Another magical aspect of the show is the opening, when the steamer that Anna and her son have taken arrives in Siam. “We knew that that ship had to be this big moment where this big, black, dirty steamer from Singapore cuts into the exoticism of the East,” says Yeargan. “There’s a conflict of cultures there. I have to tell you that one of the funniest things I’ve seen in my life was at the first preview. Nobody knew what was going to happen [when] that ship started to come down, and people literally didn’t think was going to stop. The bow was out over the audience, and some people got up and were trying to get up the aisle, only to be stopped by a whole group of Asians coming down the aisle from the other direction. It was hysterical!”
Yeargan worked on the show over the course of nearly a year, and he has joked that he spent more time on the boat than he did on the palace because he created many different versions of it. The boat was inspired by smaller steamers of the time and was created in false perspective. “We built the shell of it first — the hull — and then went up and looked at it and decided to cut it down in height as it was a real sightlines nightmare,” recalls the designer. “We wanted to make sure it was possible that wherever Kelli was on that ship that people got a look at her. Fortunately, the song isn’t very long before the ship breaks up and becomes part of the wharf. I love ships and boats, and it was a dream come true to be able to do this.”
The scenic designer lives in Milford, CT, five minutes away from Show Motion, so he spent a lot of time visiting and collaborating with the company. The ship is a metal skeleton with marine plywood appliquéd onto it, since it flexes in many different directions, and, as Yeargan notes, “there is no such thing as a straight line on a ship.”
Painted soot black and dirty grey, the boat is as neutral and colorless as possible so that the colorful costumes and props of the palace really pop when audiences first see them.
The replica steamer is pushed by three or four stagehands inside of it without motorization, then they split it apart. The ship comes onstage on a 30° angle but gets divided parallel to the curtain line. “It’s split in a very odd way,” notes Yeargan, “which conceals the fact that is split up and disappearing. It’s not like it’s cut perpendicular to the boat, it’s cut on a diagonal,” with the bow coming off and the other two pieces becoming structures within the wharf scene that follows right after Anna’s arrival. “It was fun to do. The Beaumont is an amazing space, and it brings about those kinds of solutions.”
New Project, Familiar Faces
The King and I represents the fourth time that Yeargan has worked on a show starring Tony Award winner Kelli O’Hara, following The Light In The Piazza (2005), South Pacific (2008) and The Bridges of Madison County (2014). And he has loved every minute of it. “She’s an amazing performer and a delightful person,” he declares. “She is in hog heaven with this show because she loves children. She has two of her own, and you watch her on days when there’s a matinee and an evening performance, and they all hang around backstage, she is with them the entire time. I just adore her. And what a voice, God! She’s so understated and real. It is an amazing performance. It shows a whole other side of her where she has guts and gumption when she confronts the King. And Ken Watanabe is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever worked with. He’s such a wonderful collaborator. He loves everybody and loves being in the show and hates to leave. He’s going to come back. He had a prior film commitment, and I think he comes back in March.”
This musical is also one of the many productions in which Yeargan, lighting designer Don Holder, costumer designer Catherine Zuber and director Bartlett Sher have collaborated. “We’re a real team, and Bart is fantastic to work with,” beams Yeargan. “We’ve done so much work together, now, that we have a real vocabulary and all share the same kind of aesthetic. We [also] work with other people. We’re working together on Fiddler On The Roof now. It’s going, and we’re off to a good start.”
