Trading Dancing Shoes for Siamese Slippers : On tour with ‘The King and I,’ Rudolf Nureyev launches a new career in musical theater

Rudolf Nureyev, who has been called one of the greatest dancers of the 20th Century, has made many celebrated leaps in the course of his ballet career.

With his defection from Russia in 1961, he took a dramatic leap to freedom and into the world spotlight. The 51-year-old Tartar has been making headlines ever since, and if the press is not always kind, the public keeps going to see him.

Now, he’s made another leap--into musical theater for the first time. He is starring in a new production of “The King and I” that is slated to tour for 85 weeks over the next three years, including international dates in 1990 and 1991. The Rodgers and Hammerstein show already has played for 10 weeks up and down the East Coast, and will move into the Orange County Performing Arts Center for eight performances, Dec. 5-10.

How critically successful Nureyev’s jump to the musical stage has been so far depends on what critic you read in what city.

“Regal Presence Carries Nureyev in ‘The King and I’ ” proclaimed a paper in Syracuse, N.Y. “Nureyev Stiff in His Theatrical Debut” said the Toronto Globe and Mail, and “King Should Be Dethroned” added a Boston critic.

However, Nureyev claims he isn’t phased by harsh words.

“I am here to perform, not read reviews,” he said matter-of-factly one recent autumn afternoon, sitting ram-rod stiff on a sofa in his hotel suite.

“If you read reviews, they will influence your performance. Reviews are not written for me. They are written for the public. All I demand is that they are written in good English,” he said with a bit of a chuckle, the words liberally doused with his own heavy accent.

After all, he points out, expanding into another area of performing is not all that unusual for him. “I was always game to try something new, something different.

“When I came to the West in 1961, the first thing I wanted was to work with (choreographer George) Balanchine, and also to study in Denmark with the teachers of Erik Bruhn. He was a great dancer and I wanted to learn what he learned from his teachers.

“Then later, I saw Paul Taylor dance and I tried to learn from him and his choreography and finally succeeded. It was not easy. . . . I was one of the first classical dancers to try to make a bridge to modern dancing.

“I worked with Martha (Graham). I always attempted to do something that was kind of taboo, on forbidden ground.

“I did films, again, forbidden ground . . . ‘Who does he think he is?’ ‘Why would he play in a film?,’ ” he asked in mock questions.

“Now I’m into musicals. It’s always like sticking . . . how you say it . . . poker in fire. I always manage to irritate someone.”

He admitted that yes, of course, there were early difficulties as he began work on the show and the script last summer. “Too many shalls ,” he said, shuddering a bit at the thought. “You shall do this, you shall do that. After six shalls , my tongue refused to deliver anything.”

But now, many weeks and cities have passed by, and Nureyev says he is “very comfortable” in the role. “I think I’m in command.”

Actually, Nureyev was first asked to play the King 10 years ago but declined because it would have interfered too much with his dancing. He signed for this tour with the stipulation that there be breaks in the booking schedule to allow him to accept ballet engagements around the world and continue working with the Paris Opera Ballet. (His long contract dispute with that company over how much time he should spend in Paris ended this past week when he stepped down as artistic director and took the new title of first choreographer).

This month brought the first hiatus, and in the four weeks he had off, Nureyev went to Paris and then to Russia where he danced with the Kirov, his home company, for the first time since he defected.

Now, it’s back to all those kingly shalls , as the show resumes this week in Seattle, then heads for Orange County and other cities mainly on the West Coast. This leg of the tour will end in San Francisco in February before another break.

“The King and I” had been booked into the Pantages in Hollywood for a two-week holiday run starting Dec. 26, but that engagement was recently scrapped in favor of two weeks in Miami. “We just got a better booking and a better deal,” producer Manny Kladitis said in explaining why Los Angeles was dropped.

Although there are still two open weeks on the schedule (in December and January), Kladitis said it was not prudent to bring the show into Los Angeles then. “People always think you just add water and things pop up in the theater,” he said. “We need those weeks off to accommodate getting from Orange County to Miami and then on to Vancouver (for a Jan. 9 opening).

“But we will be touring this show for two more years, and we can add Los Angeles to the second year.”

Kladitis, who is based in New York, was associate producer of a “farewell tour” of “The King and I” with Yul Brynner, the actor whose name became synonymous with the King. “Before he passed away, Yul said he was envious of whoever would get the role in the future,” Kladitis recalled. “He never expected the show to pass with him. It’s a timeless show with beautiful music.”

The producer said he had been “chasing after Rudolf Nureyev for some time” to mount a production of “The King and I.” “I followed his career for years and always felt he has all the persona you need for the role of the King--strength, posturing, childish, playful, devious. That’s what the King is, not a raging barbarian. Rudolf brings a great vulnerability to the role and he really does enjoy himself up there on the stage.”

As a legend in his own right, how does Nureyev feel about taking on a role made legendary by another performer? (Nureyev noted that he had never seen Brynner do the role on stage or film.)

“Maybe if it was first time, it would puzzle me,” Nureyev replied. “But I do Albrecht (in ‘Giselle’) after Nijinsky and Erik Bruhn, after all those famous dancers. I did ‘Faun,’ I did ‘Spectre,’ I did ‘Petrushka’ after all those very famous people.

British singer-actress Liz Robertson, who co-stars as Anna, was trained as a dancer and found the invitation to play opposite a ballet legend “very exciting.”

“To say I was going to appear on the same stage with Rudolf Nureyev was a huge thrill for me.”

They were supposed to “properly meet” and discuss the show at dinner the night before rehearsals started, but she begged off because she was jet-lagged from having to pack up her place in London and get to New York in four days.

So their introduction came on the first day of rehearsal when “he walked in and said hello, and I said hello, and then he went through ‘A Puzzlement’ (the king’s one big song in the show) which I thought was very brave, considering that (singing) is not what he does. I would have hated to start off by doing a double pirouette for him!”

This is her first tour of the United States, and since the show has played mostly one-week stands, she said “it hasn’t been a holiday . . . not what you’d call a sightseeing trip.”

Over the last dozen years, she’s worked in England in various musicals (“A Little Night Music,” “Side by Side by Sondheim,” “Song and Dance”). In 1979, when she was 25 and touring England as Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady,” she met--and later married--the lyricist for that famed musical, Alan Jay Lerner. They were married for five years before he died Feb. 14, 1988.

Her time with Lerner, she said, made her very aware of the sung word, the lyric--”and how a song can be just a song if it’s not actually thought out.”

Like Lerner, she said she’s from the “old school” of musicals “where you care about the people on stage.” She respects some of the current musicals and she understands that audiences today seem to want “the sets and the spectacles, the high-tech, the noise,” but she can’t get carried away with “inanimate objects like trains.”

Much has been made of the irony that in this musical, Robertson must teach Nureyev the polka each night as she sings “Shall We Dance.” Nureyev laughs at this.

“It’s difficult to pretend that you don’t know how to dance,” he said with a rather satisfied smile.