Two and a half years ago, the playwright David Henry Hwang approached the composer Jeanine Tesori with an idea for a show. Hwang had seen a recent revival of "The King and I" at Lincoln Center, which got him thinking about how much he loved that classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical (the songs, the story, the moment the king dies, which never failed to make him cry), and yet, how much he didn't (the play's history of showing a mostly white cast in yellowface, its implicit racism).