Rousuck's Review: ----The King and I---- at The Hippodrome Theatre

It's Thursday on Midday, and time for another of J. Wynn Rousuck's weekly reviews of regional theater. Today, she spotlights the new traveling revival of The King and I. The new show is based on the 2015 Tony Award-winning Lincoln Center Theater production, and it's now on stage at Baltimore's Hippodrome Theatre.The fifth of the many great musicals by the collaborative team of Richard Rodgers (composer) and Oscar Hammerstein II (librettist/lyricist), The King and I was adapted from Margaret Landon's novel, Anna and the King of Siam (1944), which itself drew on the memoirs of Anna Leonowens, governess to the children of King Mongkut of Siam in the early 1860s. Anna is a British schoolteacher hired to teach in Bangkok, Siam (now Thailand), as part of the King's drive to modernize his country. Anna and the King form a tense and complicated relationship: a clash of West and East as much as a love neither believes they can acknowledge.Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.