It’s no easy gig being Frosty these days. Being Australia’s most notorious music theatre producer makes you the unwitting face of an industry. But then given the majority of all major musicals produced in this country in the next 12 months will have his name on them… if the shoe fits!
The Aussie impresario announced on Monday night that the leading role in his latest reproduction of The King and I with Opera Australia will go to Jason Scott Lee while the show is in a Melbourne. Poor Brisbane thusly gets stuck with racially and vocally inappropriate Teddy Tahu Rhodes. Melbourne on the other hand gets stuck with Jason Scott Lee, and while Frost and OA creative director Lyndon Terracini are trying to put a positive spin on it, word on the street says the Opera audience is furious with the casting. Words like “underwhelming” are being thrown about. Lee has a stage background (just!) and a history with the Rodgers and Hammerstein show. He played the King opposite Elaine Paige at the London Palladium – Frosty producing there too. He gets about!
The problem here is, Lee will be playing the King opposite Lisa McCune and this drastically alters the game. Our Lisa slayed the role of Nellie Forebush, an actresses actress, of course she did. Mrs Anna mind you, is a much lighter role, and Bartlett Sher won’t be around to direct. Further it has to be wondered what will happen when McCune’s stage partner of two (by then – three!) years departs from the show.
Will the same chemistry be present, and can Jason Scott Lee carry the show if Lisa McCune isn’t up to the challenge?
This revival of a The King and I is looking more haplessly constructed with each passing moment. Unquestionably it was a grave error casting Tahu Rhodes in the role of the King in the first place – racially insensitive casting compounded by Opera Australia’s blunt statement that the casting had been “colour blind.”
The subsequent casting of Jason Scott Lee (from whom the screen has heard nothing of significance since the 90′s), a recycled lead from a production whose cast recording is now out of print, makes it look a little bit like the producers here are on the run.
A project that originally seemed like savvy good business and a ripe creative opportunity is now fast looking more and more like a sinking ship as the creative elements fail to come together.
The roles of Tuptim and the Kralahoum remain, at this stage, uncast or, at the very least, unannounced.
The production commences performances in Brisbane – Frost’s new out of town tryout Mecca, and, it’s been suggested, a punishment for Sydney for the execution of An a Officer and a Gentleman – on April 15. This gives the show a little over five months to convince audiences that it’s not fresh from the recycling.
2014 is a big year for Frosty. Grease, Rocky Horror Show, Wicked, Once and The King and I will all be on the road next year, while Frosty still has a finger in the juicy pie that is The Bodyguard in the West End.
With all these balls being juggled, King and I is the only one that has so far ever once touched the ground. In this respect, John Frost is an endangered species. Lone impresarios died out on Broadway a generation ago. Look in a program these days and usually it takes about twenty or thirty people to produce a Broadway show.
True, Frosty has the backing in some productions of Howard Panter’s mighty Ambassador Theatre Group, but their antics appear to lean more towards the flogging to death of corny old cash cows. So what’s due in 2015?
Book ahead – theatres are scarce these days. Nope – it definitely ain’t easy being John Frost.
