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'South Pacific' is revived with Kelli O'Hara

Linda Winer | Critical Mass

March 30, 2008

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How strange to sense the buzz around "South Pacific," which opens Thursday at the Lincoln Center Theater.

Isn't this the 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein chestnut that we just saw yesterday in some dinner theater or church basement or school auditorium?

Aren't we sure we know the one about the perky all-American nurse, the "cockeyed optimist" who is "in love with a wonderful guy" but needs to "wash that man right outta" her hair? Isn't this the show in which a lovable South Seas exotic sings "happy talk, keep talking happy talk" and hunky soldiers celebrate that "there's nothin' like a dame?"

Well, yes ... and no.

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Yes, "South Pacific" is almost as ubiquitous around the world as "The Sound of Music" and " Oklahoma!" But it's no chestnut - at least, that is, on Broadway.

And yes, the score has plenty of those happy/ perky songs. But as Bartlett Sher's production intends to remind us, "South Pacific" is a big, dark, luscious show - a groundbreaking musical about such up-to-the-nightly-news unease as war, racism, fear of foreigners and massive clashes of cultures.

The revival is being touted as the first since the long-running original closed in 1954. Again, well, yes ... and no. New York has seen at least six earlier productions of the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning masterwork about soldiers stationed on a remote island - including four in the 1950s and '60s at City Center, one in 1967 at Rodgers' own Music Theater at Lincoln Center, one in 1987 by the New York City Opera and a one-night concert at Carnegie Hall in 2005.

But all were limited runs and not eligible for Tony Awards. So, to the statisticians, this is, indeed, the first official Broadway-recognized staging in just less than half a century.

What took so long? According to the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, the delay has less to do with the show's clear-eyed look at this country's bigotry and more to do with the difficulties of casting in the huge shadow of musical-comedy icon Mary Martin, the original nurse Nellie Forbush, and stellar opera bass Ezio Pinza, as Emile de Becque, the sophisticated French plantation owner with the Eurasian children.

"You can't imagine the amount of time it took to cast the show," says Mary Rodgers, creator of "Once Upon a Mattress," author of "Freaky Friday" and, not incidentally, daughter of the late composer and a guardian of the legacy.

Then again, Rodgers believes, "People now are not as afraid of the racism issues" as they were in 1948, when director and author Joshua Logan first came to Richard Rodgers with an idea about adapting James Michener's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, "Tales of the South Pacific." The country still was adjusting to the euphoria and emotional costs of winning World War II, including conflicted feelings about Japan and the first nuclear devastation.

"There were people who didn't want to hear about that war," Mary Rodgers says. It is also said that after the school-desegregation riots in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957, some theatergoers would hiss when Nellie sang about being a "little girl from Little Rock."

Rodgers adds that, rather than sidestepping sensitivities, the new production "puts back really offensive racist things" that were cut from the original. Black and white soldiers are kept apart. And, to deepen the sense of war's danger and loss, director Sher even brought in war veterans to talk to the cast about the modern realities of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Rodgers dismisses the previous New York stagings, even the one produced by her father, as "mini-revivals" or "not first-class." But few will question the first-class intentions of this one. Kelli O'Hara, who played the brain-damaged beauty in "The Light in the Piazza" - also directed by Sher, with music by Adam Guettel, Mary's son - is the naive but plucky Nellie. Paulo Szot, a relatively obscure young Brazilian-born opera baritone, makes his musical theater debut as the presumably much-older Emile, who owns a plantation on the island where the American forces are stationed.

Matthew Morrison, O'Hara's Italian soul mate in "Piazza," plays Lt. Joe Cable, the soldier who sings the show's wrenching analysis of prejudice, "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught." Richard Rodgers, in his memoirs, acknowledged that the controversial song "has provided ministers of many faiths with a topic for a sermon." He noted it had been "denigrated in some quarters because it is considered propagandistic. The fact is that the song was never written as a 'message' song."

I interviewed Rodgers in 1978, a year before he died at 77. Known to correct people who called him a "songwriter" instead of a "composer," Rodgers also called himself "an incurable optimist" about the future of musical theater.

"I never felt that the theater would die, and I still don't," said the creator of 43 musicals - many of which defined the bulk of what is now known as musical theater's golden age.

"Things come in cycles," he observed about musicals. "Director's theater? Bookless musicals? They're an urge to try something new. ... I think that's very healthy."

He said, with a bracing jolt of unsentimentally, "Musicals are too popular a commodity to disappear." Then he disappeared. His voice, however, does not.

WHEN&WHERE "South Pacific" opens Thursday at the Lincoln Center Theatre, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, Manhattan. Show times are 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Wednesdays and Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays. Tickets $65- $110; call 212-239-6200 or go to telecharge.com.