The Tony Award-winning Broadway revival of The King and I plays its final performance June 26.
The lavish production features a 29-piece orchestra and a cast of over 50. Currently starring Marin Mazzie as Anna Leonowens and Daniel Dae Kim as the King of Siam, the musical played 39 previews and 499 performances at the Vivian Beaumont Theater.
The production is bound for London during the 2016-2017 season, and it is expected that the the revival’s original Tony-winning star, Kelli O'Hara, will repeat her performance in the West End. No official casting has been announced.
A U.S. national tour will launch this November in Providence, RI.
The acclaimed revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical opened April 16, 2015, at the Vivian Beaumont Theater and won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical. O’Hara and Ken Watanabe were the production’s original stars. O’Hara won a Tony Award, her first, for her performance as Anna.
“It’s been a great run. It’s been extraordinary,” Bartlett Sher, the show’s Tony-nominated director, told Playbill.com moments after the closing was announced in early June. “It was a really beautiful show. It’s so big that the running costs are extremely high. It’s done amazingly well for its size and that kind of show. So it’s pretty great. We just came from talking to the cast before I came here, and they were beautiful and very happy and felt like they made a great thing.”
The revival has choreography by Tony Award winner Christopher Gattelli based on the original choreography by Jerome Robbins. The original Robert Russell Bennett orchestrations are also being used with dance and incidental music arranged by Trude Rittmann.
The King and I reunited Sher with his Tony-winning South Pacific creative team, including scenic designer Michael Yeargan, costume designer Catherine Zuber, lighting designer Donald Holder, sound designer Scott Lehrer and musical director Ted Sperling. Casting is by Telsey + Company/Abbie Brady-Dalton, CSA.
(Updated June 26, 2016)
