What can you expect of a fledgling opera company that schedules a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical in an effort to expand opera's traditional audience base?
In the case of Lyric Opera Virginia, quite a bit.
The Hampton Roads-based Lyric Opera wasn't about to turn "The King and I" into a gut-bursting "Tannhauser" in the sumptuous production that opened Friday night at the Landmark Theater on the second leg of the three-city, six-performance tour.
Instead, the Lyric has come up with a lovely production that trades on the similarities between opera and American musical theater as it spins its 1860s tale of repressed love between the imperious king of Siam and the feisty English schoolteacher, Anna, he hires to educate his numerous wives and children in European ways.
Take that long ballet sequence — "The Little House of Uncle Tom" — midway through the second act. It was a triumph when Jerome Robbins choreographed it for the original 1951 Broadway production. It remains a stylish spellbinder in the copy-cat choreography of Yuki Ozeki.
What could be more operatic than a second-act ballet?
True, the leading roles — Lisa Vroman as Anna and Kevin Gray as the king — don't require voices of operatic dimension and range. They were written for non-singers Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner.
Vroman — a dead ringer for the film version's Deborah Kerr in looks and speaking voice — acquits herself admirably in the limited vocal range required to put across such Broadway hit-parade tunes as "Whistle a Happy Tune," "Getting to Know You" and "Shall We Dance." She sings ravishingly.
Gray, one of only four actors to play the Siamese king on Broadway, speak-sings most of his songs in the prescribed manner, but with force to spare. He draws the line between the king's male chauvinism and Anna's up-front feminism, and the battles are truly royal. But so is the powerful romantic chemistry that make this Anna and king so compelling.
The operatically inclined vocal chores in "The King and I" fall to the secret young lovers, played as fetchingly as they sing by Diane Phelan and Nathaniel Hackmann, and the king's chief wife, who is achingly vulnerable in Aundi Marie Moore's delineation.
The children's chorus numbers 80 — that's 13 more children than Siam's king had on Broadway — and the pit orchestra under the baton of Joseph Walsh is huge by today's Broadway standards.
Stage director Greg Ganakas has pulled it all together in a production that looks as great as it sounds.
Never mind that the colorful, beautifully constructed costumes were rented from a costume house. Never mind, either, that the many detailed sets are not credited either in the program or in the Lyric's promotion. They're wondrously bound together by David Neville's dramatic lighting design to provide a continual feast for the eye.
This production, coming on the heels of the Lyric's full-scale, full-dress debut with "La Traviata" last fall, signals that this company means business, but starting up a labor-intensive opera company is a risky business in the best of economic times. Lyric Opera Virginia deserves to succeed.
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