‘King and I’ Critic in Fog

Someone call a doctor for your reviewer, whose review of “The King and I” appeared Sept. 26 in Ventura County Life. As a loyal patron of the Santa Barbara Civic Light Opera who endured its version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, I can attest to the fact that the performance bore little resemblance to your rave review.

The three people seated to my left joined numerous others in not returning after the intermission. At the end of that matinee performance, the audience gave the performers polite applause, then quickly left the theater. There were no curtain calls. Obviously, we all witnessed a different sort of performance than did The Times’ reviewer. Perhaps his “humbler multicultural lenses” were so fogged by his own self-indulgent nostalgia that he was unable to perceive and think critically.

GREGORY C. FAST Oxnard