Thank goodness liberals haven’t tried to spoil musicals

There was a standing ovation from the audience at The King and I at the London Palladium on Tuesday night, but then, audiences at musicals are invariably rather a sweet crowd, way less critical than opera goers. The musical’s heroine, Kelli O Hara, who plays the feisty feminist British governess, was in the papers yesterday declaring that there was no better time to be doing the show because of its themes of understanding across the religious divide; the writers, she said, were “ahead of their time and somehow it seems they are still right ahead of their time”.

Come again? The King and I is entirely reflective of its time, viz, 1951, but it says everything about ours that our heroine feels obliged to present the piece as an exercise in cross cultural understanding. In fact, it’s hair-raisingly at odds with all our pieties about the absolute equality of cultures. The crux of the thing is that the British governess makes the entire Siamese court dress up like Europeans and eat their dinner in a European fashion in order to prove the king is not a barbarian.