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The King and He

Gravitas.

That’s what Jose Llana has learned over the years.

After an early career playing youthful and high-spirited characters in Broadway and off-Broadway musicals such as The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, where he played the easily excited Chip; Rent, where he played cross-dressing Angel; and On the Town, where he played love-struck Gabey, the 41 year-old Llana has now stepped into roles that demand power, authority, and, in The King & I, royal splendor.

Llana is starring as the king of Siam in the touring production of the Lincoln Center revival, which will play The Bushnell in Hartford Tuesday, May 30 to Sunday, June 4.

Llana stepped into the royal slippers during the Broadway run of the show last year, succeeding Ken Watanabe opposite Kelli O’Hara, and now has earned the role for himself on tour.

“My king is a little younger—and funnier,” says Llana.

He notes that Yul Brynner, who originated the role in 1951 on Broadway, was only 31 when he starred in the show, and was only 36 when the actor played the iconic role in the film. Brynner toured with the show until his death in 1985 at the age of 65.

But age and maturity are all relative, Llana says.

“The only thing I can do is to trust the material and my director,” says Llana, referring to Bartlett Sher, who staged another hit Rodgers & Hammerstein revival a few seasons back in South Pacific. (Next up for Sher in the Rodgers & Hammerstein songbook is a revival of Carousel next season.)

The tour also gives Llana special pleasure to play this particular role because in 1995, when he was 19 and as a freshman at the Manhattan School of Music to study classical voice, he was cast as the young lover Lun (singing “We Kiss in the Shadows,” and “I Have Dreamed”) in an earlier Broadway revival of the show that starred Lou Diamond Phillips.

“A lot of the DNA in the role comes from him,” says Llana, who says Phillips was a mentor to him during that production, as was the show’s other star, Donna Murphy.

Llana also says that another supporter of his at the time was Mary Rodgers, daughter of composer Richard Rodgers.

“It was a particularly close company,” he says, “and we still have reunions.”

Llana says he learned from them how to be a professional and how to lead a company with heart.

“They could not have been better role models and friends. When your first Broadway experience is in a show like that, it sets the bar very high.”

Llana says he learned that the role of leader applies off stage as well as on. He tries to make sure the company feels like a family for this production, too, which is all the more important when the cast is traveling around the country.

“We have nine kids in the company and we make sure to have dinners and activities. There’s always a birthday. And if we have the sense that a kid is having a bad day, we rally around them.”

For the record: The King & I is not Llana’s first role as a leader of a country. For the 2013 musical, Here Lies Live he played former president of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos. He hopes that the show, which was an off-Broadway hit—it featured music by David Byrne of The Talking Heads and DJ Fatboy Slim and was directed by Alex Timbers—eventually transfers to Broadway. Llana’s run with The King & I tour ends in August.

The Philippine-born Llana grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. but it was clear from an early age that he wanted to be on stage, he says. But roles for Asian actors were limited—and limiting.

“There are only so many major roles for actors who look like me that’s in the [American musical] canon. When I was younger there was the King in The King & I and The Engineer in Miss Saigon.”

Even when Miss Saigon had its Broadway premiere in the ’90s, the leading male Asian character was cast by a non-Asian. “That was a fiasco,” says Llana of the controversy that surrounded that casting.

But things have changed—though still not enough, says Llana. The current Miss Saigon revival now has an Asian actor as The Engineer and for all the understudies. What happened in the ’90s surrounding the casting of Miss Saigon could never happen today, he says, “and that’s a sign of progress.”

Frank Rizzo is a freelance journalist who lives in New Haven and New York City. He has been writing about theater and the arts in Connecticut for nearly 40 years.